It's not supposed to be easy.

Prime Future 183: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy

"It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid." - Charlie Munger

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company, is General Motors’ bet on the category. Cruise was founded in 2014 and acquired by GM in 2022 who have kept it as a separate operating company to allow the company to make more progress faster than they could within the confines of the larger bureaucratic GM machine.

And make progress they did. Until a recent safety incident in San Francisco. Cruise has since suspended all driverless operations of their vehicles in the market, though they are proceeding with autonomous driving with a driver in seat as an extra precaution.

Obviously, in the auto industry, there's a race to fully autonomous passenger vehicles, with Tesla in the lead by a healthy margin.

As with most deployments of autonomous robotics, or artificial intelligence, there are multiple levels:

Over the last 5-10 years, many predictions have been made about level 5, fully autonomous driving, being ready by 2020 or 2025 that are simply not bearing out in reality.

One analyst said that 80% of autonomous driving technology is ready, but it's that last 20% that is the hardest and will take the longest.

It's not that progress isn't being made. It's not that autonomous driving isn't still the end game; unlocking autonomous driving could save millions of lives and make the driving experience safer and better. Less road rage, less distracted driving, less drunk driving, less <insert all the problems associated with humans>.

But it's been harder and more expensive to get there than originally anticipated.

Cue the Munger quote. It's not supposed to be easy, and anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

The parallels between getting to autonomous consumer vehicles and getting to a digitally enabled food production system seem uncanny.

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