We had the Jetsons in 1962 — and autonomous driving is still out of reach

Gradually, then suddenly. That’s the line that I borrowed from Ernest Hemingway to describe the progress of strategic inflection points. They brew along for a long time — sometimes decades — before finally breaking through.

The gradual, then sudden, pace of progress

Strategic inflection points — those events that punctuate a shift from one reality to another — feel as though they came out of nowhere. But as I’ve said in my book “Seeing Around Corners” the process of a fully fledged inflection point coming to life is often a very long one. I’ve been watching the autonomous, electrification space with respect to the investments being made by automotive companies, particularly Ford’s decision to pull out of its Argo AI investment, concluding evidently that the profitability of true level 4 autonomy is such a long way off that these investments no longer make sense.

This is a familiar story, particularly with technologies that are aimed at opening up an entirely new vector of functionality. Often, while the potential of the technology is huge, missing pieces mean that a later entry realizes the innovator’s ambitions.

The Apple Newton, for instance, failed, but was the first entrant into the field of “personal digital assistants” — Apple’s…