I don't know, it looks like it's holding true so far. If it was 13 years from the Wright brothers to the first commercial flight and now we're seeing 10 years

I don't know, it looks like it's holding true so far. If it was 13 years from the Wright brothers to the first commercial flight and now we're seeing 10 years from the "Wright brothers" of self driving cars to so far not having a commercial product. Why do you think we are experiencing exponential progress in the area of self driving cars? Why do you think that the Wright brothers era weren't experiencing exponential progress with respect to the technology they needed to make commercial flight? Finally, with hardware we normally only have to worry with 3 dimensions plus time. I guess fluid dynamics is kind of complicated, but we can at least put the thing into a wind tunnel. With software things can get more complicated because they're not constrained by physics anymore. But at least we have debuggers. With self driving cars we're going to have a support vector machine or a neuro net or something like that running. Some of these techniques can't even be debugged ... they just work or they dont. I'm not sure being free of the limitations of hardware is an asset.