I have been a big skeptic of self-driving cars and other AI promises for years, taking my downvotes as armchair futurists predicted a self-driving car would be picking me up any day now, well before it was popular to be a contrarian after Tesla and Uber killed their drivers. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Also notice the original links have the breathless hype from journalists who know-nothing and eat up whatever technologists' PR firms tell them.

Huge VC money has been and will continue to be destroyed by "AI"-businesses. Most of them are a cover for hiring tons of cheap laborers, such as businesses in the Philippines that park thousands of people in warehouse offices to review images, despite "advances" in AI detection that continue to be unable to automatically block content.[7]

Artificial general intelligence, and self-driving cars as well, will continue to be a pipe dream. Automated statistical analysis, which is what neural-networks that crunch tons of data essentially are, are a very neat trick but cannot drive a car nor build you a website. They can be very powerful tools that assist people in their jobs, but they will not replace human ingenuity. At least not until a new breakthrough happens that actually learns, rather than sifts through data for patterns which has limited utility.

Our current type of "AI" is simply branding - it is nothing of the sort and it is not intelligence at all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153613#10153800

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11559393#11561600

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10132991#10133049

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12011979#12012336

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12323039#12323473

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12596978#12598439

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13961802#13962230

[7] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/