> It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding.

Waymo was giving out multi-million dollar bonuses. You too will learn to believe in whatever it is required for you to believe to get those bonuses.

The hype is because not very long ago nobody even expected that what they’re doing now would be possible. That they can even do what they’re doing now is an amazing achievement.

It turns out that it’s not enough and we need another breakthrough, but it might not have been possible to see what the limitations of the new approach were going to be when they were doing new, previously impossible things every week.

I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy. We had been bound to the surface of the earth for thousands of years of civilization and then suddenly it seemed like we had no limitations. You can probably excuse a little bit of excess enthusiasm.

> I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy.

The takeaway from the history of 20th century technology is that a given field plateaus much more quickly than the optimists expect, sometimes short of what’s needed to be truly useful. Something simple like voice recognition has been an area of intense research for 30-40 years. And it’s still not useful for all but the simplest things. I have 10 Siri reminders from the last couple of days. 4 are so badly mangled I can’t figure out what I meant to remind myself. Barring some fundamental advance, we’re not going to be talking to our computers as a primary input.

The same thing with other technologies. We broke the sound barrier, but never developed the tech to make supersonic travel cost effective. We put a man on the moon, but have yet to develop the tech to colonize off world bodies. Transistor speed and density have plateaued. After years of doubling CPU clock speeds every year, Intel crawled from 3 GHz to 5 GHz over 15 years. (If CPU speeds improved so slowly back in the day, we’d be using 200 MHz Pentium Pros today.)

Likewise flying cars. They have existed for several years; I saw one fly in 2013. But they cost at least $250,000, or (for newer electric models) they have ridiculously short runtimes. These drawbacks weren't part of the plan in bubbly 1960s predictions, and they're not going to be quickly overcome.

In the 1970's we saw the rise of "safety first" as a philosophy for life. By the 1990 most people believed it. Safety first as a prime directive leads to doing nothing in the end. Almost none of previous tech advancements from controlling fire a million years ago to nuclear weapons could have happened following "safety first". I can't think of any new inventions (except recreational ones like wing suits, and a some medical devices and drugs) since the 1970's that can kill people when used. A huge number of things we use heavily would never be invented today. Steam engines, cars, trains, electricity, natural gas in homes, etc. Millions died as these inventions were improved and still kill millions today. The inventor of new things were only allowed to put "use at your own risk" on software, so that is where all the new stuff has happened in the last 50 years. That era is now ending as cyberwarfare, ransomware, "fake new" become serious problems and super AGI is popularized as a possibility.

Sure, S curves exist for all technologies, but now the only tech allowed to even start are ones that are thought to be powerless (ie., next to useless). We wanted flying cars but got 140 characters.

This is a pattern that AI demonstrates with every cycle, from the 1960s, 80s, and continuing now.

Some breakthrough solves 20% of a problem, and 40% is easy to get to. 60% takes exponentially more effort. It never gets to 80% and AI collapses into a winter. 100%, it seems, requires general intelligence and that is always receding into the future.

At some point, the technology is adopted as-is, and we learn to work around the problems.

It may not have been easy to see that another breakthrough is required, but it was very easy to see that most predictions were laughable.

The CEO of Waymo announced[1] in May 2018:

> Phoenix will be the first stop for Waymo's driverless transportation service, which is launching later this year. Soon, everyone will be able to call Waymo, using our app, and a fully self-driving car will pull up--with no one in the driver's seat-- to whisk them away to their destination. And that's just the beginning!

[1] https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=5795

Similar, in that anyone with an understanding of science would not believe those things?

Decades out? Here's a real world report. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ab2nqe/way...

What part of that thread/video series are you calling attention to?

> They can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips

Clearly it does work for simple trips.

Trips are only simple in retrospect.

To "work", as self-driving car has to be able to deal with all contingencies, such as unexpected heavy traffic, pedestrians, kids, drunk college students, sudden rain, sudden fog, constructions, police redirecting traffic, etc.

Oh, and it also shouldn't kill anyone more than once in 100 million miles or so. Even if some trips turned out to be slight less simple than predicted.

You edited your comment without any mention of it. This is considered bad etiquette and is derailing to the conversation. Please try not to do that in the future.

It can be if we have the correct infrastructure. If we highlight thousands of ppl dying every year in dui, accidents ect. If we highlight this problem same way media highlights mass shootings. Mobilise ppl to buildout infrastructure that would save thousands of lives. But ofcourse nytimes and co doesn't care about that because its not left vs right clickbait.