I was expecting a more nuanced article that talked about the “Suez Moment” in America but this is basically a (not even a good) critique of deindustrialization.
I don't expect anything from the guy who declared self driving cars are easy, everyone is just doing it wrong, and he could do it better in a just a year; 5 years ago. The fame totally went to his head :P It is somewhat common issue for Nobel award winners, in this case the scope is limited "I am great at security and reverse engineering, that makes me an expert for anything IT related".
Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.
Oh, until it hits an obstruction.
Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.
Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.
Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.
Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.
Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.
Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.
Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.