This is such a transient thing.
If you're not primed to notice a self driving car (already thinking about it / having read it) you may miss it.
And once you've seen it a few times, the novelty decreases a lot.
I try to keep wonder for things that I have experienced already (Holy crap; I'm in a metal tube that's going close to the speed of sound 7 miles high!) But pretty soon other things win (How long do I have to sit in this little seat? And I'm hungry...).
Arguably the thing that is most extraordinary is that we've made these wonderful, bizarre things such a matter of routine. Look around you. Nearly every object in the civilized world is a constructed object, borne from human thought. Every street, every edifice, every artifice. Even almost all of the foods and raw ingredients have been crafted to meet our needs. Wow. But flour is a >30,000 year old technology and not something people get excited about...
It's kinda like the invisible gorilla experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html
It was a much, much better and far less obvious version, I can't tell because obviously I knew what I was expecting, but I strongly feel with this 1999 version I absolutely would've caught it. Very poorly done compared to the other one I've seen.
Ah, here it is, this one uses a 'moonwalking bear'. Upon seeing them both again, I 110% agree with my assessment that the bear version is far, far superior.
The space the original video uses is too small, and maybe it's that the camera angle is poor; it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I actually had troubles following the ball because the gorilla was just too obvious and distracting.
The whole point is that selective attention can make seeing even very obvious things difficult.
> it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I used it on a class full of middle school science students two years ago. 21 out of 24 missed it in the first class. 5 out of 24 in the second, though they insisted no one warned them :D
Sure, Uber passes 60-75% of the fare to drivers, but that pays for the depreciation/opportunity cost of the vehicle, the energy to move the vehicle, the insurance, the cleaning, etc.
A lot of the problems that these 'no brainer' new technology start-ups face (e.g., the autonomous delivery robots) is actually that they aren't that much cheaper than humans (for now).
This reminds me of a flight I was on a few months ago. There was a new flight attendant on board, and amazingly it was also her first time traveling in an airplane. She was looking out the window and commented to another flight attendant about how astonishing it was that you could see the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas or the canyons in Utah from that vantage point. Then she paused, looked around the cabin, and asked "Why does everyone have their window shade down? This view is breathtaking." The other flight attendant laughed and replied, "They're all desensitized to it by now."
And the opportunity for curiosity for purely seeing a thing is only the first few times you see it. You were in that window, but how do you know they were in that window?
When I am walking around in a big city, traffic is more of an annoying fact of life than something I would regard as interesting.