Earlier quoted context omitted.
High altitude planes going to the moon is a beautiful analogy. I think this is what I’ll use to explain to less technical friends why I think we’re still many years from self driving cars.
The question isn't whether high-altitude planes can go to the moon, it's whether human intelligence is closer to the clouds or to the moon. For all the talk about how language models "just" learn correlations, there's a remarkable dearth of evidence that humans do something qualitatively different.
Perhaps now, but if history is any indication, when we (as humans) think we have a good grip on how something really works (like human intellect in this example), we've been wrong.
We model the world around us from observation and testing, find our errors, remodel, and improve over time.
Then at some point we find some piece of information that shows us our model was a decent approximation, but fundamentally wrong, and that we need to start from scratch.
If we find that we want to go beyond the moon (and we eventually will), or that the moon is further than we think, we'll again need a different approach.
I always feel like there's a certain beauty and cosmic humor to it.