"There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground."
Curious as to why there is such an obsession with hovering vehicles in pop culture depictions in the future. It seems cool but that it would be inefficient even if we did develop it. (Using a crapload of power to suspend a heavy vehicle when it could be sitting on the ground just doesn't make much sense to me.)
Well, we do have maglev trains such as the ones in Shanghai. I could be wrong but I think the main benefit is the vehicle doesn't need to overcome rolling resistance, making it easier to accelerate and allowing faster travel.
It's lateral and vertical acceleration. You'd have to build rail tracks and roads surprisingly flat and straight to travel across them at above 100 m/s (200mph, 300 km/h). We're talking lateral accelerations of 5-10m/s², or above 0.5g. This can be achieved with very well maintained tracks only, which is a second limit to high speeds besides high power consumption. There was some discussion about this when Elon Musk published his railway ideas.
Because it looks so much cooler. And you never have to worry about bumpy roads or rocks or any of that ever again. You can go over water like it's nothing! It's something that seems amazing but not completely impossible.
When people romanticize this idea, they're never thinking about efficiency or practicality. Only how cool it seems.
Video phone calls are the same thing. As someone else pointed out here, the idea of it seems really cool and amazing. But we've had that ability now for years, and it turns out: it's actually less convenient and efficient than just sending a simple little text message. So it doesn't get used a lot.
Curious as to why there is such an obsession with hovering vehicles in pop culture depictions in the future. It seems cool but that it would be inefficient even if we did develop it. (Using a crapload of power to suspend a heavy vehicle when it could be sitting on the ground just doesn't make much sense to me.)