> self driving cars are still not here

Yeah they are, even if you don't have one yet. We can rathole into whether the need to hit level 5 before it "counts", but Waymos drive around multiple cities, today, and Tesla FSD works well enough that I'd rather drive next to a Tesla with FSD than a drunk driver.

If your evidence that AI isn't something to be worried about is saying self-driving cars aren't here, when they are, will then, we're fucked.

The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. For cars, this manifests as they're physically not available everywhere yet. For programming, it's unevenly distributed according to how much training data there was in that language and that domain to scrape across the whole Internet.

Oh wait I’m not sure if I was clear I just mean: yes we’ve gotten lots of hyped claims like “FSD will be here in 5 years” in 2014 wrong but it is to our peril not to take the very short AI timelines seriously

Also — I think the arguments of yourself and another comment are also great analogies to AI situation, we can haggle over “ok but what is {FSD, AGI} really and in many ways it’s already here!”

I agree totally and I would just point out we’re at an even more intense moment in the AI space