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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.