I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke.
It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from 100 to 200 in the same amount of time. Or less! Why would you even question it?
Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.
I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.
In my opinion, it's as similarly off-base as to making claims that 'mach speed consumer air travel' "arrived" just because for a few decades you could catch a Concorde flight between NYC and London.
You’re right that they have a long way to go before being fully mainstream. But thousands of people are using them every day in multiple major cities. That’s a pretty big milestone.
Not able to handle what the streets of Los Angeles throw at it, however.
None of this is even close to happening. Waymo is impressive tech, for sure, but what they're proving is that this is just not currently solvable as a general problem. The best we can do is to meticulously craft a solution for one constrained use case - driving in SF, driving in LA, etc. And even then, we need to pick certain use cases - it's not like they could use their current tech to start autonomous service in Juneau Alaska. Or even NYC, most likely.
I'll believe self-driving is solved when I can order an automated ride to a BLM/forest service dirt road I only have GPS coordinates for and that has cell service on the hilltop only.
Might as well move it to "as long as there's no semi crossing the road" to cover for Tesla.
Centrally-managed clean and rigid setting is not the full extent of the problem domain.
As I said, I'll believe it's solved when these limitations are no longer necessary for it to work. You can choose to believe it based on a research project or marketing materials.
For most people, they'll consider self-driving as "happened" when most cars are self-driving. Similarly, the consider the smartphone as "happened" not when the palm came out - but somewhere around the iPhone 4.
Like, right now, immunotherapy for cancer has "happened" - there's real patients really doing it, for real. But most cancer patients don't consider immunotherapy as "happened", they're still getting chemo. Once chemo is obsolesced, we can consider immunotherapy as "happened". From then, to now, may be on the scale of decades.
It turned out automating creative output, like art or writing, at least to be competitive enough with entry-level humans, was much easier, and the consequences for getting bad output are much less serious, and far short of death, seriously injury, and major financial liability as with self-driving. Fields like concept art and copy editing are already being devastated by generative AI. Voice overs too.
And looking at Google's Veo, I can easily see this tech being used to generate short ads, especially for YouTube, where before you would have had to hire human actors, cameramen, sound/lighting people, and an editor.
I would not be opposed to living in a future where I can personally live in space. It would be quite fun.
[1] (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-has...
Unless people are envisioning living in magical holodecks all the time, with magical food replicators? But those don't come along automatically with "space", no matter how much Star Trek you've seen...
(my comparison is incomplete though, it doesn’t factor in that these two also have a huge financial incentive to be hyping this stuff up)
What is that man smoking and can I have some?
Five years wouldn’t be enough time to “colonise” Antarctica, let alone another planet (just one!), and certainly not anything at a larger scale, even if we were visited by aliens tomorrow and they gifted us five hundred spaceships to give us a boost.
> “If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.”
You are confusing "era of maximum human flourishing ... begin to happen" with "have colonized galaxy".