Comment by rjf72

1957 - First ever man-made object launched into space.

1957 - First ever animal launched into space.

1960 - First ever animal launched into space that survives the trip.

1961 - First man goes into space.

1965 - First man goes on a space walk.

1966 - First spacecraft lands on the moon.

1967 - A probe is landed on Venus (!) which collects and sends back video and audio recordings among other data.

1968 - First spacecraft to orbit the moon and then return to Earth.

1969 - We put men on the moon who then safely return.

We've done all of this in just 12 years! We literally went from nothing to men on the moon in 12 years! We've barely scratched the surface of what's possible and there's no sign of things slowing down at all! Can you imagine where we'll be after decades of this. Where will we be in 50 years? I can't even begin to imagine what 2019 will be like.

I don't say this to be snarky, but to point out the issue. Exponential growth doesn't mean continued exponential growth, and it's always very difficult to predict the future. While thoughts such as the above were common place, there would have been hardly a person to predict that the room-sized government "computing machines" would one day be a few inches large, millions of times more powerful, and cost as little as a week or so of minimum wage work. In some cases, those exponents did keep churning for a while.

On AI, I used to be a futurist in terms of it - until I got to work with it. Now I'd be extremely surprised if we have have fully capable self driving vehicle within the next decade that's not constrained to white-listed routes. And that is an extremely softball problem since it fits perfectly into the small domain of problems that current ML/AI systems are really great at making progress on. The thing is getting to a testable model is absolutely trivial. Going that remaining 10% from model to product is many orders of magnitude more challenging.