Originally Posted by
Walter S
A common fallacy in human reasoning is to assume that if we can do certain things that seem amazing by standards of the past, that we'll ultimately do all of the seemingly impossible things we face with ease. It just doesn't work that way. ...
The cars we drove on the moon were not particularly complex to develop. The hard part was getting them there, not driving them.
But we did get them there. Which is somewhat the point of the analogy. I would agree of course that not all achievements and advancements are analogous, but within similar technological realms the great forward leaps in the past can be seen as foreshadowing what will be possible in the future.
What is amazing by standards of the past and what is seemingly impossible are two very different things. AVs may indeed seem amazing by standards of the past, but they are not in this day and age seemingly impossible. They are not only possible but already in in existence. In this case technological advances in the past are indeed instructive regarding what we might reasonably expect for improvements in this extant technology.