All my tech podcasts (and now print media apparently) have been pushing a "self-driving cars are almost here" narrative for the last couple weeks. But to be blu

All my tech podcasts (and now print media apparently) have been pushing a "self-driving cars are almost here" narrative for the last couple weeks. But to be blunt here, isn't this total bullshit? Let's say that's 5 years away; well that's at best in the realm of "who knows". Has anyone here made an accurate 5 year roadmap? Yeah.... I don't know what exactly is going on here, maybe Waymo and Cruise media relations teams are really earning their bonuses this year, but it's pretty gross. Kevin Roose had the guy from Cruise on and they were talking about the effect of self driving cars on gig drivers, and he said he felt like Cruise needed to take an active part in helping those drivers retrain or find other work. All I wanted was a single follow up: "what are you currently working on in that space?" Because the answer would be "lol we're not actually working on it, and if anyone does it it will be the government" (which is also the AI industry's response). But also these cars are driving in the best of circumstances: nice weather, slow or predictable traffic, reasonable road layouts, etc. Wake me up when a car can drive me through snow on a highway narrowed to a single lane on New Year's Eve after I've been drinking heavily. My guess here is that industry is hoping we'll start adapting to self-driving cars, not the other way around. I'm not saying that's bad, but it's an entirely different story than "The tech is close to working!" It would be more like "The tech never worked right, we basically made trams, and that was fine, but woof very expensive"