> Few would have predicted the results we’re seeing today in 2010.
That's hardly accurate - didn't Musk and Co. promise self-driving cars by 2012? We're in 2020, and the SDC's are great for making youtube videos, but not any good at piloting a vehicle without human intervention.
Since the 90s it has been clear that the only thing holding back what we have today is limited processing power. While there may be some new insights and directions in AI, they are not "general" and they require 3 orders of magnitude more processing power for a lot smaller improvement in performance.
What has been clear since 2010 is that this field has passed the point of diminishing returns already. We throw vastly more computational power at problems that we ever did before, and then call the result an improvement.
Deep blue beat the best human at chess using 11.8 GFLOPS of computational power. Alphago beat the best human at go using 720000 GFLOPS of power. The complexity difference between Chess and Go are within a single order of magnitude - 10x to 99x difference in complexity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity). The difference in AI processing power to beat the best human between Chess and Go is between 4 and 5 orders of magnitude (1000x and 100000x).
This does not look like a success to me - it looks like a brute-force approach. If you spend 10000x more resources for a 10x more benefit, you're at the point of diminishing returns.
Here's a great paper that should be written (but won't be) - plot the improvements in AI and the usage of computational power for AI on the same chart.
From the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars#1...):
"The robot achieved speeds exceeding 109 miles per hour (175 km/h) on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 5.6 miles (9.0 km), or 95% autonomous driving."
Yup, 95% autonomous. Today we have 95.x% autonomous with roughly 10000x the resource power thrown at the problem.
So, yeah, your assertion that "Few would have predicted the results we’re seeing today in 2010." is wildly off mark, we predicted more than what we see today because we did not expect to hit a point of diminishing returns quite so quickly.
The people who did the 95% SDC in 1997 would have been disbelieving if anyone told them, in 1997, that even with 10000x more processing power thrown at the problem and new sensor hardware that was not available to them, it won't get much better than what they had.