Thinking back to this CGP Grey video and how I believed it at the time.
And now:
US trucker shortage means everything is more expensive
The trucking industry has been short drivers for years, but the pandemic made it worse. The shortage means the price of groceries and moving costs are going up. CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich reports.
Source: CNNBusiness
I think they've been overhyping the technology to get VC funding which has given us a warped sense of its inevitability, much like lab-grown meat.
The VCs have caught on by now, but back during the peak of the hype, self-driving cars were a great VC grift. A talented enough engineer would only need a year or two to build self-driving car software that works 95% of the time on clear days on highways or wide suburban roads. To any layman that sounds like you're almost there, maybe halfway if you're pessimistic, so clearly you're going to overshoot all the other attempts that have been floundering for years, so they should invest in you. But in reality, each percent of that extra 5%, each other kind of road, and each other kind of weather condition is, very optimistically, a five-year project for a large fully funded team of experts.
But why does the autonomous car grift live on while the robot squeezed juice grift dies before liftoff?
Autonomous vehicles also appeal to the capitalist fantasy of sacking a bunch of workers and replacing them with machines. The number of people who fantasize about robot squeezed orange juice is just two guys who've spent way too much time on image boorus.
I mean, one could argue that animal domestication and factory farming have had us on the path towards "lab-grown meat" for centuries. What are pig pens and chicken coops if not increasingly limited and controlled environments for producing foodstuffs? We're just coming at it from the other end. Rather than trying to turn vegetable waste into a lump of edible meat in a petri dish, we're trying to turn a sentient ambulatory life form into a regenerating torso that you can hack chunks off of indefinitely.
Yeah, there's definitely a "pay me to make the infinite money fountain dream a reality" angle to this. But there is also tangible progress towards the capitalist's ideal being made.
I was thinking about this story that was recently posted here.
TIL.
It's a bummer.
News and radio stations all across the country eagerly pounded this sense of inevitability into the masses though. Bourgeois scab media is only too happy to reiterate the bosses threats.