zlacker

The same way that the expectation of many people working within the self-driving field in 2016 was that level 5 autonomy was right around the corner.

Take this stuff with a HUGE grain of salt. A lot of goofy hyperbolic people work in AI (any startup, really).

>>timr+(OP)
Sure, but blanket pessimism isn't very insightful either. I'll use the same example you did: self-driving. The public (or "median nerd") consensus has shifted from "right around the corner" (when it struggled to lane-follow if the paint wasn't sharp) to "it's a scam and will never work," even as it has taken off with the other types of AI and started hopping hurdles every month that naysayers said would take decades. Negotiating right-of-way, inferring intent, handling obstructed and ad-hoc roadways... the nasty intractables turned out to not be intractable, but sentiment has not caught up.

For one where the pessimist consensus has already folded, see: coherent image/movie generation and multi-modality. There were loads of pessimists calling people idiots for believing in the possibility. Then it happened. Turns out an image really is worth 16x16 words.

Pessimism isn't insight. There is no substitute for the hard work of "try and see."

>>timr+(OP)
While I agree with your point, I take self driving rides on a weekly basis and you see them all over SF nowadays.

We overestimate the short term progress, but underestimate the medium, long term one.

>>timr+(OP)
The same thing happened with nuclear fusion. People working on it have been saying sustainable fusion power is right around the corner for decades, and we still don't have it.

And it _could_ be just one clever breakthrough away, and that could happen tomorrow, or it could be centuries away. There's no way to know.

>>huevos+l8
I don't think we disagree, but I will say that "a handful of people in SF and AZ taking rides in cars that are remotely monitored 24/7" is not the drivers-are-obsolete-now, near-term future being promised in 2016. Remember the panic because long-haul truckers were going to be unemployed Real Soon Now? I do.

Back then, I said that the future of self-driving is likely to be the growth in capability of "driver assistance" features to an asymptotic point that we will re-define as "level 5" in the distant future (or perhaps: the "levels" will be memory-holed altogether, only to reappear in retrospective, "look how goofy we were" articles, like the ones that pop up now about nuclear airplanes and whatnot). I still think that is true.

>>huevos+l8
Self-driving taxis are available in only a handful of cities around the world. This is far from progress. And how often are those taxis secretly controlled by an Indian call center?