It's been a while since I've looked at the actual numbers, but from what I recall (the point could be made over a reasonable approximation of X), >80% of the spoken words in an average english speaking adult's spoken language corpus exist in the vocabulary of the average english speaking kindergartner.
In other words, it takes us two-ish years to learn how to use our vocal cords, and another two to three years to get to 80% of an adult's vocabulary. And yet it takes another 12 years just to increase our vocabularies a handful of percent and to become fairly proficient at piecing together those words into coherent and mature enough communication for full time employment.
And that is just one example. Learn 90% of Haskell in one afternoon...learn the rest over the next two decades of your life. Learn 90% of derivatives trading from one book, but spend the rest of your life learning the rest. They aren't examples so much as they are a fact of life: There is an extremely long tail to learning, and extrapolation of where you will be given how fast you've learned up to some arbitrary point will be impossible.
Self driving cars aren't just learning the rules of the road. They are learning human spatial sensory perception and fast heuristics for ad hoc path planning that have been evolved over several millenia. And yes, they are becoming extremely capable extremely quickly...but you won't be able to extrapolate linearly to get to a point where they can take over.
I'm not sure that's right. Googling around suggests that the average 5 year old knows somewhere between 3000 and 10000 words, and the average adult knows somewhere between 15000-20000 words. So I think saying a five year old has even 50% of an adult's total vocabulary is probably generous. Of course, if you meant that a five year old would understand about 80% of the words spoken by an adult over the course of a day, 80% sounds like a very conservative guess.
Not that it affects your point at all, I'm just thinking about words now. And while I'm on the subject, XKCD's "Thing Explainer," a book on how things work using only the 1000 most common words, is great fun.
In other words, it takes us two-ish years to learn how to use our vocal cords, and another two to three years to get to 80% of an adult's vocabulary. And yet it takes another 12 years just to increase our vocabularies a handful of percent and to become fairly proficient at piecing together those words into coherent and mature enough communication for full time employment.
And that is just one example. Learn 90% of Haskell in one afternoon...learn the rest over the next two decades of your life. Learn 90% of derivatives trading from one book, but spend the rest of your life learning the rest. They aren't examples so much as they are a fact of life: There is an extremely long tail to learning, and extrapolation of where you will be given how fast you've learned up to some arbitrary point will be impossible.
Self driving cars aren't just learning the rules of the road. They are learning human spatial sensory perception and fast heuristics for ad hoc path planning that have been evolved over several millenia. And yes, they are becoming extremely capable extremely quickly...but you won't be able to extrapolate linearly to get to a point where they can take over.