Redefinitions aside, fully capable AI is right up there with commercially viable fusion power, cost effective quantum completing, and fully capable self-driving cars, as a technology that is quickly advancing yet always a decade or two away.
Waymo's self-driving cars are scaling quickly. With some inaccuracy it can be said that the problem is solved, we have the technology for a full-scale deployment, we just need to do the boring work to deploy it everywhere.
> Also, when you look at these cars and there’s no one driving, I actually think it’s a little bit deceiving because there are very elaborate teleoperation centers of people kind of in a loop with these cars. I don’t have the full extent of it, but there’s more human-in-the-loop than you might expect. There are people somewhere out there beaming in from the sky. I don’t know if they’re fully in the loop with the driving. Some of the time they are, but they’re certainly involved and there are people. In some sense, we haven’t actually removed the person, we’ve moved them to somewhere where you can’t see them.
Even if it's not some staggering triumph of human achievement, I'd argue that Ozempic (etc.) is similar. A magic weight loss drug has always captured the public's imagination, and it feels like I've been hearing about new weight loss drug studies in the news for my entire life that never went anywhere.
We've "succeeded" at space flight about as much as we've "succeeded" at AI. Yay, man on the moon! Over half a century later, and it turns out that the "next small step" - man on Mars - isn't so small and still hasn't been achieved. Anything remotely resembling sci-fi-style ubiquitous space travel remains exactly that - sci-fi!
Flying a plane and intercontinental flight are different levels of the same remarkable achievement.
A man on the moon, or the SpaceX rockets that land and can rapidly relaunch, both feel like hard problems that have been solved, although it’s not the next hard step of intergalactic space travel.
Fusion power seems closer than ever. And plenty of experts just five years ago thought AGI would still be decades away. A credible expert suggesting AGI is ten years away is a sign of real progress.
