Why We Don’t Have Self-Driving Cars

It seems that many of the failed promises of technology are marked by an asymptotic trajectory, that is, it’s like a curved line in mathematics that gets ever closer to another line, but never quite touches it (or, like the proverbial traveler who goes half way to his destination, then half way more, then half way more for eternity, thereby getting microscopically close but never arriving). I’m guessing that many of the promises of artificial intelligence haven’t been realized and won’t be realized because of this “closer and closer but never getting there” problem we are encountering. My hunch is that “asymptotic” is a word we will hear more and more in the 21st century as the promises of technology, especially AI, fail to materialize.