What you see with respect to self-driving cars IMO is a lot of people who SO want them to exist that they assign timelines that are so optimistic they&#x27;d be rolling on the floor laughing if applied to projects they had direct familiarity with. Of course, it&#x27;s also fueled by a lot of hype and hand-wavy statements about exponential growth and the like.<p>Like many other aspects of AI, I&#x27;m not sure just about anyone thinks we need to have strong AI to make self-driving cars work under the vast majority of conditions. We &quot;just&quot; need to create automation that can handle a reasonable number of corner cases without flipping out or grinding to a halt. But that&#x27;s a debate about engineering timelines not something more philosophical.