Ask HN: Are there any on HN skeptical of the predictions regarding automation?

It's now almost accepted wisdom on sites like HN that the coming wave of automation will have drastic effects on society ,employment statistics in particular. This feeds into the wider theme of AI , the singularity and people like Elon Musk donating money to prevent an AI apocalypse. The past shows that it is dangerous to bet against technological progress , so here I would like to say that I am only expressing skepticism on how long it would take for these things to play out. Reading HN or /r/futurology would have you think that we're just 2 or 5 years away from significant adoption of self driving cars and just 20 years or so before we start feeling severe dislocations in the labour markets. I don't see how the regulatory and technological hurdles can be overcome in such a short period of time. Considering the state of tech , it could be 5 - 8 years before we have truly self driving cars , and years more before governments and the public start accepting being around them. Another thing is that in Africa,India etc humans will continue to be cheaper for a long time. There will also be significant opposition in these countries if it gets good enough. But I still don't get how we could have fully autonomous trucks barelling down our free ways , carrying produce farmed by autonomous tractors , to retail stores with automated check out and shelf stacking robots. This is a degree of AI that simply doesn't exist today. There's a long gulf between identifying objects in a picture (the state of the art today) and actually doing stuff like farming or cooking. On the other hand , if we are actually on the cusp of something like this its truly mind boggling. We could have products made from metals mined autonomously , shipped to autonomous factories , assembled by robots and shipped via self driving trucks and delivery drones to our door steps.