I made a bet in 2012. A friend was strongly convinced that fully autonomous cars were five years away. I didn’t believe it could work in Europe.
Fast forward to 2025 and we still don’t have fully autonomous cars in Europe. I won that bet. It turns out that even as you put in more and more rules, the terrain was never really like the map.
With the shift to AI however, the approach fundamentally changed from deterministic to probabilistic. Turns out that this is much closer to our experienced reality. Rather than a set of rules, navigating the world is a chain of probabilities. Technological systems that take this approach are much better at being our copilots. And they will eventually be better pilots, influencing reality at levels indistinguishable from fellow humans. The terrain is increasingly becoming one with the map.