> Go back a few years and many here were incredulous if anyone suggested we might be looking at decades to have full door-to-door self-driving.
As someone who has done this kind of push-back here, I can confirm - this place was highly incredulous of, if not downright hostile, to people with experience in AI who were explaining all these were false promises.
Anyone who actually did robotics knew just how much of a pipe dream this is, how slow progress is, and how solving the easy 50% is worth nothing because the real world gets superlinearly difficult. ML made a great jump, but it only solved parts of the problems we needed solving, and so far failed to introduce a bridge to those other parts. But you try telling people, and they won't listen, and now I understand the curse of Cassandra. :)
But I'm reserving special bile for those CEOs and Directors of Research who knew full well that we don't know how to make this stuff, and that most of it is an open research problem that's decades away from productizing - and yet they marketed it anyway, as if it was a done product that's ready to go, and took customers' and investors' money for something that experts knew was very, very, very clearly vaporware.