In May, I had the chance to interview Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. A historian and former president of Midland University in Nebraska, Sasse was elected to the Senate in 2014. Our conversation covered a wide range of topics from the impact of automation to the technological revolution in agricultural to education reform to the challenges of teaching young people a sense of resilience and self-reliance—which is the topic of his new book, The Vanishing American Adult.

Here are excerpts from our discussion of what he sees as the unprecedented technological disruption caused by automation.

Rob Tracinski: You did an op-ed recently in The Wall Street Journal, based on a speech that you gave, where you talk about the impact of automation and talk about how it is an unprecedented economic and technological transition that you think we're not prepared for. So I want to start thinking through those parts separately. Could you explain why you think this is an unprecedented transition in the economy?

This past week's "Petya" ransomware attack on companies, airports and government departments across Europe—the latest in a series of massive and high-profile cyberattacks—has renewed calls for lawmakers and regulators to adopt tougher rules governing device insecurity.

That would be a mistake. Rather than rely on regulatory wrangling, policymakers should look to the role market-based mechanisms like warranties and guarantees can play in providing information about product quality in the "Internet of Things," just as they currently do in the market for used cars.

The Internet of Things industry actually has much to learn from the secondhand car market. Just as in the market for used cars, it can be costly and challenging for consumers to sift through information about which sellers of networked devices offer the best products at the best prices. As the Nobel laureate economist George Akerlof has detailed, when a consumer can't discern whether a given product is of good quality, uncertainty and dishonest practices can erode trust between buyers and sellers, causing markets to function poorly.

Like Akerlof’s depiction of the troubled market for used cars in the 1960s and 1970s, there is a credibility problem in the market for IoT devices. According to an Accenture survey, 47 percent of consumers cited security concerns as a reason they won't adopt "smart" devices in their homes. This suggests there's value left on the table by both consumers and sellers. According to McKinsey, the market for IoT devices could generate between $3.9 and $11.1 trillion in economic value by 2025. But in order to realize this full potential, it's critical that consumers gain confidence in the security of their devices.

I first came across the concept of "The Singularity" in 2005 by reading Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Reading the book was an epiphany, since Kurzweil was able to combine several separate but related trends of the computer revolution and explain what it means for humanity in a form that non-engineers could understand.

The idea of "The Singularity" has been around since the early 1950s, when computer/math genius John von Neumann told a friend that all the changes he had seen in his lifetime regarding the "ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life," made him think that mankind was "approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

A second, more concrete example of this "ever-accelerating program of technology" arrived in 1965 when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published an article observing that computing power was increasing exponentially in power while decreasing steadily in cost. At the time, Moore thought the "law" cutting computing costs in half every two years would run about a decade or so, but the trend has now continued largely unimpeded for an incredible 50 years.

In the past half-century, computing power formerly available only to the federal government or research universities has migrated into the pockets and purses of 4 billion smart-phones users around the world. Kurzweil's great insight was to figure out that if both industry investment and computing power trends continued well into the 21st Century, it was possible for a computer to pass a "Turing Test," named after another mid-20th Century computer/math genius Alan Turing. Turing in 1950 developed a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human being, thus proving artificial intelligence (AI). Kurzweil in 2005 predicted this test would be passed by roughly 2029.

In this series, I have been considering what we can do to smooth the adjustment to a technological revolution in automation—but from the perspective of a skeptical free-marketer who doesn't buy into ill-conceived utopian schemes like the basic income.

In part one, I considered what policies might make education better and less expensive, making it easier for people to acquire the new skills required in a new economy. The New York Times just offered an update on one really important piece of that puzzle: a movement to shift to "skills-based" hiring for "new-collar jobs," rather than requiring an expensive four-year college degree for every tech job.

In this installment, I consider the ways government is preventing people from adjusting to the new economy by walling off digital boomtowns.

In an age of automation, wealth is going to flow to new places. If it flows to high technology and robotics and artificial intelligence, a lot of that wealth is going to end up in centers of innovation like Silicon Valley, the San Francisco area, Boston, and New York City.

Sometime around 2011 or 2012, it suddenly became very easy to predict what people would be doing in public places: Most would be looking down at their phones.

For years, mobile phones weren’t much to look at. The screens were small, and users needed to press the same key several times to type a single letter in a text. Then, 10 years ago – on June 29, 2007 – Apple released the first iPhone.

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” former Apple, Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said during the iPhone’s introductory news conference.

Within six years, the majority of Americans owned a smartphone – embracing the new technology perhaps faster than any other previous technology had been adopted.

On June 27, the ATM turns 50. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker once described it as the “only useful innovation in banking.” But today, the cash that ATMs dispense may be on the endangered list.

Cash is being displaced in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track. There are credit cards and electronic payments; apps such as Venmo, PayPal and Square Cash; mobile payments services; cryptocurrencies that operate outside the purview of central banks; and localized offerings such as Kenya’s mPesa, India’s Paytm and Bangladesh’s bKash. These innovations are encouraging cashlessness across communities worldwide.

It’s reasonable to expect cash to follow the path of other goods that have been replaced by digital alternatives, such as photos, music and movies. Will cash – and the ATMs that dispense it – experience a “Blockbuster” moment and disappear from our neighborhoods?

Not so fast. Cash will likely become less popular, thanks to the high cost of using cash and the growing array of alternatives. But I expect it will remain with us forever. The future will be “less cash,” rather than cashless.

Everyone is starting to become concerned that the machines are about to take away all of our jobs—at least, all of the jobs that we do now. Everything is on the chopping block to be automated, from flipping burgers to driving trucks to filing legal papers to making a medical diagnosis. Even writing computer code is supposedly going to be automated. With the rise of artificial intelligence, this is all supposed to happen extremely quickly, leaving a vast population of superfluous workers.

A lot of this is overhyped and exaggerated, of course. The process of transformation is likely to take a lot longer than predicted, and there is good reason to think that while many tasks will be automated, fewer actual jobs will be automated, so in most cases machines will end up augmenting human workers instead of replacing them.

Those of us who are technological optimists can point to the history of the Industrial Revolution as evidence that a big economic and technological transition might seem terrifying at first, and it might eliminate or reduce some of the old jobs that we're familiar with, but it will produce many new jobs that had never been conceived before, along with enormous amounts of new wealth for everybody.

Yet the example of the Industrial Revolution is not quite that reassuring. It was a wrenching disruption, not everybody adapted to it successfully, and the result was an age of political and cultural disruption that provided the roots for populist, nationalist, and totalitarian movements. It's not something we necessarily want to repeat.

Everyone's very excited right now about "flying cars" because—hey, who wouldn't be? It's right up there at the top of the science fiction wish list, along with the robot servant who cleans your house for you. And now we're being told pretty frequently that the flying car is on its way.

But we're not getting a lot of sober discussion about the problems that actually need to be overcome before you can go airborne on your morning commute. Here are seven big problems we're going to have to solve before flying cars can make it to the masses.

1. Rotor Wash

Here's where I get on my soapbox and insist that almost everything we're being told is a "flying car" isn't really a flying car. It's pretty straightforward. A flying car is a car that flies, which means that it has to be capable of driving down a normal roadway.

A recent headline for Defense One labeled Rocket Lab as “The Rocket Startup That’s About to Eat Elon Musk’s Lunch.”

Don’t be misled. Elon Musk is still the king of low cost space launch.

“[Rocket Lab] is promising to put objects into space for less than $5 million per launch,” the author writes, “That’s about one-tenth as much as its nearest rival, SpaceX, which claims an average launch cost of $57 million, and a tiny fraction of the $225 million price tag for a launch by United Launch Alliance, or ULA, the U.S. industry leader made up of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. (ULA says its launches will eventually cost closer to $100 million.)”

However, if potential customers look at what the price tag gets them, SpaceX is still clearly the most cost-effective option. The main difference is the cost-to-weight ratio. While standard single launch costs for a Falcon 9 are around $62 million, according to the company’s website, the vehicle can lift more than 50,000 pounds to low Earth orbit in its most current reusable design. That’s a cost-to-weight ratio of about $1240/pound of payload. The Electron Rocket might look like the better option at $5 million per launch, but it only lifts about 500 pounds to low Earth orbit. That’s a cost-to-weight ratio of $10,000/pound of payload. By weight, Rocket Lab will put your small payload into orbit for eight times the cost of a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Will another driver's car "talking" with yours someday save your life? The answer, from regulators and many automakers, is a resounding "Yes." Such a promising technology should have many takers. So why are federal regulators seeking to force it on the public?

To that end, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the final days of the Obama administration proposed a new regulation that would mandate all new light vehicles to be installed with technology to enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. The proposal aims to require cars to connect to one another at a distance of up to 300 meters, to allow the transmission of direction, speed, and braking information that could alert drivers to approaching hazards, such as stalled vehicles and drivers running red lights. NHTSA estimates that by 2060, for a cost of up to $109 billion—the second-most expensive car regulation this decade—the mandated technology could save between 987 and 1,365 lives annually.

That is the narrative advanced by proponents of a forced V2V regulation. Unfortunately, it ignores key challenges facing widespread deployment—and thereby any consumer benefits. The proposal relies heavily on an obsolete communications protocol, to the detriment of superior competing technologies. This protocol, called dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), has enjoyed exclusive use of certain airwaves allocated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1999.

This largely unused block of radio spectrum sits immediately adjacent to the frequencies used by Wi-Fi devices, which face growing congestion problems. The cable and wireless industries have been lobbying to gain access to this spectrum block, arguing that current policy has resulted in billions of dollars in lost economic opportunity. Indeed, one study estimates that allowing Wi-Fi devices to share this spectrum would result in benefits to the economy between $191 and $744 billion dollars.

As WannaCry’s ransom deadline approaches for tens of thousands of cyber victims around the world, many would agree that global cybersecurity has not kept pace with the complexity and virulence of attacks. The hacking of American and French electoral candidates, theft of NSA malware tools, and subsequent ransomware attack have shaken the world out of its complacency.

While Congress considers restricting the NSA through the recently introduced PATCH Act mandate, the US and its allies should set their sights on quantum cybersecurity, which employs the properties of quantum physics to secure data. Most of the world's electronic data is protected by sophisticated encryptions which can only be unlocked with the correct numeric key. The quantum-enhanced version of this technology is believed to be impregnable, and can be viewed, with a small amount of irony, as a three-piece Russian nesting doll.

Quantum cybersecurity's “outer shell” is the physical infrastructure that electronic information and numeric keys are travelling across, usually fiber optic networks. Built correctly, quantum key distribution ensures the information sent over these networks is unhackable because it travels in quantum states, such as single photons or lasers. Because such networks are governed by the principles of quantum physics, the quantum particles carrying the data would change their physical state if someone attempted to hack or observe them, thereby halting the transfer of information and alerting the users of an attempted hack. Quantum key distribution would provide the highest level of protection for exchanging keys and sensitive information between both classical and forthcoming quantum computers.

The numeric keys also require robust encryption to ensure they’re securely exchanged. There has been an on-going race between encryption approaches and hacking capabilities, with each side grappling for the upper hand. The method commonly used today, asymmetric encryption, will eventually be overpowered by quantum computers, which is why quantum resistant algorithms are currently being developed. While this technology is about five years from adoption, quantum resistant algorithms can be incorporated into the quantum network technology that exists today.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by Chairman Ajit Pai, voted 2-1 on May 18 to begin the process of reversing Obama administration policies that classified internet service providers as Title II public utilities and put them under the agency's thumb. Advocates of the change hope that removing the regulations will boost private-sector investment and reduce the call for taxpayer- and ratepayer-funded broadband networks.

Title II classification gave the FCC more stringent oversight over those providers, allowing the agency to enforce ex-Chairman Tom Wheeler’s version of "net neutrality," purporting to prevent those companies from inhibiting or slowing down access to certain websites or web services.

But those regulations hang "like a black cloud," according to two dozen smaller ISPs who wrote Pai recently, noting they are heavy handed and hurt innovation and investment. Those providers, members of the American Cable Association who were branded "gatekeepers" by Wheeler as he justified Title II regulations, said it's not in their interests to slow down traffic.

David Barnes, director of policy engagement for Generation Opportunity, alluded to the innovation issue when he issued a statement applauding Pai's move.

On the seventh move of the crucial deciding game, black made what some now consider to have been a critical error. When black mixed up the moves for the Caro-Kann defence, white took advantage and created a new attack by sacrificing a knight. In just 11 more moves, white had built a position so strong that black had no option but to concede defeat. The loser reacted with a cry of foul play – one of the most strident accusations of cheating ever made in a tournament, which ignited an international conspiracy theory that is still questioned 20 years later.

This was no ordinary game of chess. It’s not uncommon for a defeated player to accuse their opponent of cheating – but in this case the loser was the then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. The victor was even more unusual: IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue.

In defeating Kasparov on May 11 1997, Deep Blue made history as the first computer to beat a world champion in a six-game match under standard time controls. Kasparov had won the first game, lost the second and then drawn the following three. When Deep Blue took the match by winning the final game, Kasparov refused to believe it.

In an echo of the chess automaton hoaxes of the 18th and 19th centuries, Kasparov argued that the computer must actually have been controlled by a real grand master. He and his supporters believed that Deep Blue’s playing was too human to be that of a machine. Meanwhile, to many of those in the outside world who were convinced by the computer’s performance, it appeared that artificial intelligence had reached a stage where it could outsmart humanity – at least at a game that had long been considered too complex for a machine.

MIT recently announced that it is offering a $250,000 Disobedience Award for someone who offers "an extraordinary example of disobedience for the benefit of society." Because, "You don't change the world by doing what you're told." Is this meant to encourage civil disobedience? Of course, because "Laws evolve over time and are meant to be challenged."

The guidelines specifically call on the principles of "non-violence, creativity, courage" and say nominations should not be limited to examples from politics or civil rights but can also include those who strike a blow for "the freedom to innovate." The New York Times describes it as an award for "breaking the rules."

Submissions are still open until May 1, which is good because I would like to make a timely nomination. The award should go to: Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber.

We're all supposed to hate Kalanick right now, and there has been a whispering campaign—no, people don't whisper any more, it's a shouting campaign—fueled by a spate of bad publicity. Kalanick got a little snippy with a disgruntled driver who was yelling at him (and who then sent the video to Bloomberg, which treated the incident as if it were news), and the company has been dogged by rumors that Uber has a classic Silicon Valley "bro" culture that's not friendly to women. But the thing that got Uber in the most trouble is something that is a sterling example of non-violent disobedience that fosters the freedom to innovate and makes the world a better place.

The Future of Human Augmentation and Performance Enhancement

In most of our science fiction and our projections of the future, everything has changed—we have robots, flying cars, artificial intelligence, warp speed, laser swords--but we remain pretty much the same. Humans of the future are exactly the same physically and mentally as humans today.

In science fiction, this is probably necessary for dramatic purposes. You want the audience to identify with your characters, and that's harder to do if those characters are too strange and different. When science fiction does touch on the idea of genetic or cybernetic enhancements, it usually does so as a dystopian cautionary tale. Even the Star Trek franchise, our usual go-to source for an optimistic take on the future, becomes notably technophobic when it comes to human augmentation. The idea of cybernetic enhancements, of bionic limbs and brain implants, gave the Star Trek universe its most menacing antagonist: the Borg. As for the idea of genetic enhancements, well, let's just sum up Star Trek's attitude this way.

It has been the lifelong dream of many a young scientist, engineer, and science-fiction fan, and I myself have often used it as a gauge of whether we're really in the "the future" or not—so it is with great personal sadness that I have to break the news to you that you can't really have a flying car. None of us can.

And worse: the reason is not a mere technological complication or economic limitation that can be overcome with more investment and research. The problem is the basic physics of the thing. The person telling you that you can't have a flying car is Isaac Newton.

To understand why, let's first define what we're talking about when we talk about a "flying car." We're talking about the kind of vehicle we've seen over and over again in science fiction: a car that can drive along just like normal, then at a moment's notice take off vertically and move through the air. Like the flying cars in Blade Runner.

An Interview with Blake Scholl of Boom Technology

Supersonic flight is both a technology of the future and a technology of the past. The sound barrier was first broken in 1947, and the Concorde started offering supersonic passenger flights in 1976. But the Concorde was mothballed in 2003, ending the era of commercial supersonic flight—for now.

Boom Technology is one of a handful of startups trying to change that. I recently talked with Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl, an engineer who started out at Amazon and worked on several Silicon Valley startups before taking on the problem of supersonic flight.

Rob Tracinski: What is Boom Technology trying to accomplish?

Manu Saadia takes on Peter Thiel, as a proxy for Donald Trump, for saying that he prefers Star Wars over Star Trek because the setting is more capitalist.

There's a lot of over-reading going on here, particularly because this all takes off from a short throwaway comment in an interview with Thiel where he comes across, frankly, as a pretty casual science fiction fan. It's hard for people in the technology media to grasp, but not everyone is as obsessive about overanalyzing science fiction as we are.

Yet the author of this piece is an expert at such overanalysis, because he has written a whole book on "Trekonomics," the economics of the fictional society in the Star Trek franchise. This strikes me as odd, because Star Trek is very conspicuously not about economics. Most installments of the franchise take place on government-run ships devoted to non-commercial endeavors like space exploration, diplomacy, and—more often than its creators would probably like to admit—war. We know that the fictional future of the Federation is fabulously prosperous and full of technological luxuries, but with the exception of a few vague references here and there (usually reflecting Gene Rodenberry's woozy utopian liberalism) virtually all of the production and trade in that future society happens off screen.

Writing about economics in Star Trek is like writing about politics in Star Trek. We know the Federation isn't a dictatorship, but we never see political media or any mentions of political parties or elections. The crew of the Enterprise doesn't obsess over some future equivalent of Twitter, though that might just be proof that we are dealing with a more advanced civilization. We assume they must be active and engaged in politics, just not when the cameras are running, so to speak. And that's fine. Politics and economics are not what the show is supposed to be about.

This has been such a horrible year for politics that some people were wishing for a giant meteor to strike the Earth and put us all out of our misery—and they were only half-joking. But there is, thank goodness, a lot more to the world than politics, and from the standpoint of emerging technology, 2016 was a year filled with wonders and marvels.

This was the year a whole cluster of long-imagined technologies started to come to fruition and went from science fiction or breathless speculation to actual reality. Here are the five big "emerging technologies" that actually began to emerge in 2016.

1. Self-Driving Cars

This is the year the self-driving car went from "possible" to "inevitable" to "actually on the roads."