I love the tension between the "OMG Robots will do everything, even write code!" and "Technological progress has essentially ground to a standstill" camps.

It's refreshing to see something from the standstill camp; thanks to self driving cars the former has been enjoying its day in the sun.

Especially so since it fits with a nice cultural narrative about the haves and the have-nots; the theory being that all the robots will take all the jobs and leave only a small elite to live in hyper-luxury (see: Elysium).

It's nice to see the counterpoint. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. There was this crisis of resources, of which the technology to extract them had peaked... (speaking of, how can we ignore fracking?).

Anyway the bubble burst and the narrative changed. Google's self-driving car gained a lot of hype and suddenly people were worried about automation again (think of all the drivers!).