For the record, I'm actually rather bullish on self-driving cars. There's nothing physically impossible about solving the problem, but I'm not surprised it's harder than it sounds. But I don't see humans being fundamentally prevented from solving the problem in the same way that humans are fundamentally prevented from ever engaging in everyday space travel.
It's not hard to imagine that this kind of thing could end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for things like background scenes in the future, opening up the kind of stuff we saw in The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, and the LOTR film trilogy to increasingly lower and lower budget productions.
I think in a lot of modern stuff they go too far. They now use CGI for things that could easily be practical effects, but they go with CGI because it's simply cheaper or because they want to A/B test different colors of wall paneling behind a character in post production, or who knows what. The end result is apparently good enough to make a billion dollars, but I can't stand it. Movies don't feel authentic anymore. It's hard to describe rationally, but the word 'soulless' sums up how movies made the new way make me feel. Even the scenes which are wholly practical/real get degraded; the excessive CGI and compositing used in the rest of the movie cast a miasma of unrealness across the entire movie.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/248d25e2185a58bf827d329490480fb9...
I remember listening to the DVD commentary track for X2 (from 2003), and loving that scene near the beginning where Nightcrawler is hiding out in a cathedral but losing control of his teleportation powers because he's being remotely controlled/possessed by the villain of the story. Bryan Singer talks on the track about how great it was to fling the character (can't remember if it it was actually Alan Cumming or a stuntman) from the rafters, and how much better and more weighty it looked to have a "real" shot and just have to remove wires/harnessing vs filming it as a blank canvas and having to insert the character digitally.
This video does a good job of explaining why, I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY-zg8Oo8p4
For real though, I think the best CGI has always been when it's a light touch, providing only slight enhancements to an otherwise mostly-practical scene. And that's also when it's most invisible— so while superhero movies are obvious CGI-fests and can be clearly said to have been "ruined" by it, I think the most interesting modern CGI use is in lower-budget productions like TV shows, enabling the insertion of fantasy- or period-themed backdrops that would never be possible if you had to actually come up with all those props and extras in real life.
And I think to the extent that this is already happening, it's a lot harder to track because it's so much more subtle than the bombastic in-your-face effects of a Marvel movie showdown.
It would be interesting to see a revival of a show like Drive [0] as that was pretty ambitious and expensive for its time, but might be a lot more possible to do now.
Laypeople tend to think everything is linear, technologists tend to think everything is exponential; more often than not, reality tends to be sigmoidal. Technologies have exponential takeoffs followed by logarithmic plateaus. We're clearly well into the exponential phase of deep-learning ML, but it's only a matter of time before this approach hits its logarithmic phase.
Of course, the hard part of sigmoidal prediction is determining where in the curve we are. Does the current paradigm have an even steeper part ahead of it? Maybe. And yet, we could just as easily be right in the middle of the function, with a leveling off coming as the state of the art gives way to incremental improvements.
That's a bold prediction. Why do you think that?
The first thing I thought was the exact opposite. This isn't very good, but it's only version 1. Motion pictures are less than 150 years old. In another 150 years I bet virtual filmmaking will progress a lot.