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Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers
(www.commondreams.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yeah me neither. I've heard claims that automation will take away jobs from drivers in the future, but not anyone actually saying "it's undeniable that by 2025 most cars will be driving entirely by themselves". And I remember when GPS was a spy-gadget daydream you imagined having when using maps. (Actual, physical maps. Not Google/Apple Maps.)
I heard it in the same vane that I heard that we would have a moon base by 2020 a mars base by 2025 and nuclear fusion in just 10 more years
To be fair, the progression estimate loading bar for fusion was stuck at "estimate... 30 years" for fucking ages.
And now there are actual reactors. Experimental, but still.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/conceptual-design-completed-for-japans-fast-fusion-demo-project
Most importantly, the projections of fusion being 30 years away depended on assumptions about funding, when political considerations made it so that we basically never came anywhere close to those assumptions:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png
Fusion was never vaporware. We had developed working weapons relying on nuclear fusion in the 1950's. Obviously using a full blown fission reaction to "ignite" the fusion reaction was never going to be practical, but the core physical principles were always known, with the need for the engineering and materials science to catch up with alternative methods of igniting and harvesting the energy from those fusion reactions.
But we never really devoted the resources to figuring it out. Only more recently has there been significant renewed interest in funding the research to make it possible, and as you note, many different projects are hitting different milestones on the frontier of that research.