In just a few sentences in his article at Newsweek Jeremy Gelbart expresses my view of autonomous vehicles pretty succinctly:
Will there be a future where autonomous cars dominate the roads? Yes.
Will this future be in 3 years? No way.
It’s even possible that autonomous vehicles will never “dominate the roads”. It depends on all sorts of things, mostly non-technological.
I honestly don’t think that most people understand all of the hype we’re hearing about autonomous vehicles. In the California Gold Rush of 1849 great fortunes were made but mostly not by the miners. The greatest rewards were reaped by the people who sold tools and supplies to the miners.
I don’t believe that Google or Elon Musk want to be the General Motors of autonomous vehicles. I believe they want to sell the AI technology to the companies that will compete to manufacture autonomous vehicles. And, in Elon Musk’s case at any rate, to secure rents.
