So anyone who has been around for even a few years has witnessed probably more than AI hype cycle. This has been going on since probably the 1960s. While there have been (I'm sure) advances over the years, some no doubt substantial, what's clear is that the big thing that was and is needed is a truly massive amount of computing power.

Now I believe that self-driving cars will ultimately be transformative for society in a way not seen since the automobile itself or possibly even mass electricity generation.

But I just think this is still way further off than the more bullish pundits are predicting.

To be clear, there are two milestones here:

1. Assisted driving

2. Autonomous driving.

It's the second that'll be truly transformative. This is when cars won't be designed to have human drivers at all.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit here like highway driving where basically you need to not hit the vehicle in front of you and you need to stay in a lane at a fairly constant speed.

Assisted driving is the incremental approach needed to prove these technologies and bring self-driving to market (IMHO). This will be gradual and slowly replace some aspects of manual driving. It will probably soon reach the point where the car will intervene to prevent an accident. I expect even this to be cautiously adopted as there is a massive product liability issue here.

A drunk driver drives on the wrong side of the road and has a head on collision and society just tends to write that off as unfortunate, the cost of doing business basically. But as swoon as the car makes a decision that injures or kills someone (and it will) the lawsuits will be swift and massive. That's a problem. In fact, it may be the biggest problem. Nevermind the inherent risk to drivers, passengers and bystanders when you put a meat sack behind the wheel.

But the long tail of this problem is huge, to the point where I'm not sure you can really solve it without having an almost or actual general AI. So much of this is anticipating what humans will do. I mean things like placing a bucket or a plastic bag on the road and seeing what an autonomous car does.

Thing is, people seem to think this is totally going to happen real soon now when we have a long history with this in the form of aviation. People have been trying to automate humans out of flying planes forever. Unfortunately there seems to be an uncanny valley type situation where too much automation can actually make things more unsafe. I'm talking here about incidents where automated systems did or nearly did cause incidents that the humans had problems overriding.

And planes have to deal with probably substantially less situations than cars do.

I honestly don't know why Apple thinks it can compete in this space. It doesn't play to any of their core strengths.

If I had to pick anyone in the box seat here it would be Tesla.

Tesla already produces cars and has a go-to-market strategy. After Tesla, I'd add Google simply because you can never totally discount Google.

I take Apple scaling back as a positive sign here... for the company. I take it to mean that they realize just how far away this is and how difficult a go-to-market strategy is and also that this just doesn't play to their strengths.