> whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.

Company execs sure did. "Autonomous vehicles" is the mirage that Uber, Waymo and others dangled in front of investors and press for years. Can't blame the public for not figuring out that it was a fig leaf to paper over their eye-watering losses.

I mean... company execs _knew that their VCs_ believed it, anyway. I would wonder to what extent they believed it themselves.

Upton Sinclair probably applies too:

> it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it

If you're Uber leadership, well, you're strongly incentivised to believe that there is _some_ way out, even if that way out might seem pretty implausible to a dispassionate observer.

People working in tech believed this. Hell, people directly working on the tech seemed to think this a few years ago, and are only now admitting reality.

Of course, one tends to be optimistic of these things when they work on them.

I don't think anyone working on self-driving tech believed the breathless "next year" predictions. Or, at least, it's hard to understand how they could have. I'd buy that they believe that maybe someday there will be self-driving cars.

The predictions I was hearing weren't far off. We did know Elon was full of shit, but a lot of people thought we'd be further along by now.

5 years ago I was hearing 10-20 years. This was from people who were connected and knowledgeable in the industry. Now the same people are singing a different tune.

Maybe in 20 years from now, but it's looking pretty impossible in the next 5-10 years.

10-20 years as a prediction in tech, though, generally means "shrug who knows maybe never". Historically, predictions that far ahead are virtually useless.

You are talking about mere milliseconds in the grand scheme of things. There's plenty of advancements 10-20 years off that are far from vaporware and will probably happen within 5 years of prediction.

The issue is that misestimation of a few key factors and overestimation of our current capabilities. If we already have the tech for self driving cars, maybe it will only take 10 years.

Assuming this something computers do quite well (wrong assumption, but it seemed reasonable at the time), we already have vehicles that can navigate themselves (we do), and we're only somewhat recently getting to the point that cars are sophisticated computers (mostly true, although computer control of car isn't something new.

There have been lots of ECUs for sometime, but the capabilities have really exploded. Maybe we just haven't gotten around to do self driving and the tools are in our hands right now!

When you understand how the auto industry works, 10 years is a relatively short timespan, that will result in ~2-5ish major design iterations. If you don't have the feature presently in the pipeline, the clock is really ticking, assuming it's new technology.

To deliver on the 10 year deadline, you will only have a couple years to be almost completely ready. 10 years is not "who knows", it's a bold prediction that implies the final product is imminent. People in tech didn't know what the fuck was going on, thinking we'd have taught the cars to drive and got the tech figured out in 5-7 years. It was loony toons.

Many very smart people I know, at least one of them inside the industry, seemed extremely confident of this. Things look different now.