This one in particular, I find fascinating, because we've literally just _had_ a hype cycle over it (I remember people telling me they'd be here any day now a decade ago), and now we're onto another AI hype cycle, almost immediately. Which comes first, AGI, or the self-driving car? :)
(I think your other examples are qualitatively different; moon bases, supersonic (passenger) jets and asteroid mining are clearly possible, but impractical for economic reasons; no-one is willing to _pay_ for them. Plenty of people are willing to pay for both self-driving cars and AGI, but there is just no clear route to achieving either.)
There is no shortage of human intelligence in the world. The average person is remarkably intelligent. But they need a lot of learning and practice, and often plenty of organizational support, before they can use that intelligence to do something useful reliably.
We know how to make cars that are stupid and reliable. We know how to make cars that are intelligent and unreliable. But there is still a lot of work to be done before we can make cars that are both intelligent and reliable.
The only AI product I use in my daily work is Copilot. It can usually make useful and accurate suggestions, sometimes even remarkably so, but it also makes stupid mistakes all the time. Copilot is most useful for automating boring routine work, where I can quickly catch and correct its mistakes. It's far less useful for the difficult parts, or when I don't know what I'm doing, because the mistakes it makes are less obvious to me.
https://youtu.be/-Rxvl3INKSg is a news reporter's video of taking a ride in one, so you can see what it's like to ride in one. She's a news reporter and thus not your average person because she has access to Waymo because she's a reporter, but members of the general public are also getting access and are able to do this as well. After watching that, I think a reasonable average person could believe that self driving cars are here.
As was said upthread, the future is here but unevenly distributed.
We will continue integrating ai in all products for the next year's to come.
The money invested and what it opens up is still huge and it pointed a lot of people to this area for very good reasons.
But after the hype the work is there and now takes time.
Copilot rollout in my company (100k people) is only happening right now
We often get excited about these things, but society usually doesn't. That may be one way in which the current AI boom is different.
First three are purely hardware problems, among other things (like profitability). But asking where are the self driving cars in 2023 is a bit disingenuous. Yes, we don't have Level 5 autonomy accessible by everyone for the general public, but we already have Waymo and other cars already driving on public streets, and we do have Tesla with their FSD that some people are using for 90+% of their daily commutes. So yeah, it took longer then some people anticipated (and will still take a bit longer until these systems are widely deployed, bulletproof and affordable), but we're definitely getting there.
In the latent spaces of Stable Diffusion and friends.
On the other hand, you can scrape the internet, build a model, semi-rig a couple of demos, hype the product and earn money.
Don't forget, it's all about money. Product is just a means to get money.
Building good things and earning good money as a byproduct is a thing of the old. Boomer stuff. Modern people don't do that anymore. It's not efficient, capitalist and quick enough.
I think that's a much more likely outcome than AGI.
Even if AGI is possible it's going to be constrained by the training resources thrown at it. Since most of those have been thoroughly enshittified now, the outcome for intelligent AGI isn't looking good.
Even if AGI hacks into everyone's camera and messages it's still going to turn into a spam+selfie moster superbot, and not Operation Paperclip 2.0.