The argument is that self-driving won't work because Uber and Tesla had well-publicized crashes. But I don't see how this tells us anything about other, apparently more cautious companies like Waymo. There seem to be significant differences in technology.

More generally, machine learning is a broad area and there's no reason to believe that different applications of it will all succeed or all fail for similar reasons. It seems more likely there will be more winners along with many failed attempts.