[peaslock]

While automatic data collection might become harder, one can still curate high quality datasets. An example is Tesla's FSD autopilot which is nearly entirely trained on curated data (AFAIK), as well as highly realistic 3D simulation data. Sure, it is expensive, but the expected returns are also very high.

However, there is some evidence that NNs currently are somewhat limited by the availability of high quality data,[0] however I'm not sure this is really a problem because neural nets already accomplish amazing things, so one might not need that much data to get something useful (perhaps at the expensive of more compute, but so what; e.g. analog computing might give some 1000x speedup anyhow).

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Fpvch8RR29qLEWNH/chinchilla...