[nopinsight]

Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.

For software, however, a rapid turn is often a possibility. See: AI for coding over the last 3-4 years.

AI autocomplete --> AI coding assistants --> vibe coding --> agent orchestration

Coders can now accomplish work that used to take a week or longer in a couple of hours, with the right tools and skills.

---

A key issue the article implies is that the real world increasingly runs on software.

[Animats]

> Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.

Yes. The bottleneck has been getting the cars manufactured. It takes a certain amount of time to get a factory going, and then the product starts pouring out. Waymo used up the supply of Jaguars, about 3,500 of them. The Ioniq 5 plant is starting up.[1] Waymo has ordered 50,000 cars, all ready to have the self-driving electronics plugged in. Waymo gets out of the sheet metal bending business with this.

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/02/11/hyundai-supply-waymo-50000-io...

[scotty79]

Decade ago my friend thought AI driving is going to be aftermarket kit.

[odo1242]

comma.ai (mentioned by other comment) is really good actually, somewhere between Autopilot and Autopilot FSD in quality

[randallsquared]

Still possible! There's comma.ai waiting to take your order if you have a compatible car.

[watwut]

> Things in the real world often take longer than expected.

Things in the real world often take longer than hype con men claim.

[RandomLensman]

But there is also still a huge part that doesn't run on software with so far little change.

[nopinsight]

With incessant advances in robotics, how long would that continue to be the case?

Should we start preparing for something that could be world-changing in the next 10-20 years?

[toasty228]

When I graduated a bit over 10 years ago some people were saying we'd have a permanent mars bases by now. When my parents graduated they were told they'd retire at 45 and have 3 days work week due to "automation", they're still working at 60+ today, more than back then actually

People should open history books and gain some political/historical culture, this thread is 90% wishful thinking and "if the lines continues straight from now we'll basically be gods in 5 years"

[falcor84]

The "Yesterday's weather" argument works perfectly just up to the point when it doesn't.

[toasty228]

Just like the "if the lines continues to go up" argument...

The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people

[falcor84]

> The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position

Why? If someone running a company really believes that the line will soon stop going up and AI won't be replacing anyone, they could make the bet of strategically not investing in any AI initiatives, and instead investing in hiring and upskilling people who want to work without AI, and then just wait for the inevitable crash of all their competitors, no?

[RandomLensman]

For how the world might change in 10-20? I'd say no need to prepare, too many hypotheticals.

[nopinsight]

"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...

I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...

We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...

And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.

I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate

https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253

[RandomLensman]

Certainly a well reasoned view, but I don't necessarily have to agree.

Even assuming the technological predictions to be correct, still not sure I agree on the need to "prepare" as how things work out in societies and economies might not be so easy to predict.

[toasty228]

Does a good engineer, with the right skills and right tools make up for the thousands of kids basically giving up on education and learning?