T: What's happening with this sausages, Charlie?
C: 2 minutes, Turkish.
-- 5 Minutes later ---
T: How long for the sausages?
C: 5 minutes, Turkish.
T: It was 2 minutes, 5 minutes ago.
I don't know why I remembered it. Is it AI, or self driving cars, or both. Huh.
self driving cars are here, just unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in several cities already, providing millions of rides to people. Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Waymo operates in tiny parts of several cities when you look at the maps. They didn't finish the first 90% when you look from that perspective.
Waymo provides a tech demonstrator in a closed circuit, and you can pay to ride their demonstrators in select areas of select cities. It's not half bad, let's be honest, but having these limits puts them to a point very far from "self driving cars are here". Even Tesla isn't there with their camera only subsystems and "if you crash you keep both pieces" policy. It's another tech demonstrator you can buy.
If we accept your point that "self driving cars are here", we should accept that Fusion energy is a solved problem because WEST tokamak held plasma for 22 minutes, electric propulsion is a solved problem since we have electric trains for a long time, and Hyperloop is fully operational because I have scale model in my backyard which carries thousands of ants every day.
People open their phone, order a car, take a ride from an arbitrary point within the geofenced area, to another arbitrary point inside that area. Within that area. they're handling real life conditions. dogs and children running into the street, bicyclists, moving trucks blocking streets, construction. Other cars. Maybe that's not enough for you, but that's not a carefully staged tech demo with a car driving a loop around a fixed track at Disneyland that's gonna break the moment it has to deviate beyond what you're allowed to touch. Unless you think Waymo is paying all the drivers in LA drivers to drive different around their cars, I guess.
If the tokomak was energy positive for those 22 minutes, there was more than one of them, and they were running it multiple times a day then I would say it is. But it's not. I'm not sure why you have this need to lump them together. Fusion is quite a different problem, with yet to be solved materials science problems and control systems issues. I'm not claiming that fusion's here, and also I don't think quantum computers are gonna be here anytime soon.
