The most impressive thing in retrospect is that all that work was done on 32-bit processors with ~16 MHz clocks and ~8MB of RAM. And those machines cost $5000 each in 1991 dollars. Today I can buy a machine with 100 times faster clock and 1000 times as much RAM for about 1% of the price. That's seven orders of magnitude price-performance increase in <30 years. It's truly mind-boggling.
> one would think that today we would be making enormous progress every day
Actually, we are. Back in the day, I would have given long odds against seeing autonomous cars on the road in my lifetime. Notwithstanding the odd mishap, today's autonomous vehicles actually work much better than I would have thought possible.
> And what do i use my phone for? check email and read HN.
What's wrong with that? Add wikipedia to that list and put a slightly different spin on it: today you can carry around the equivalent of an entire library in your pocket. That seems like progress to me. When I was a kid, you had to actually (imagine this) PHYSICALLY GO TO A LIBRARY in order to do any kind of research. If you didn't live close to a good library you were SOL. Today anyone can access more high-quality information than they can possibly consume from anywhere for a few hundred bucks. It's a revolution bigger than the invention of the printing press.
It's true that society doesn't seem to be making very effective use of this new super power. But that doesn't make it any less of a super power.
> Actually, we are. Back in the day, I would have given long odds against seeing autonomous cars on the road in my lifetime. Notwithstanding the odd mishap, today's autonomous vehicles actually work much better than I would have thought possible.
you are probably correct. in comparison with the past we are moving fast, it just feels that we could do so much more with what we have.
> It's true that society doesn't seem to be making very effective use of this new super power. But that doesn't make it any less of a super power.
this is the sad part. but on the flip side this means there are so many opportunities for those who have the desire and drive to make things better.
Just in case you're interested:
https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/38880
and the associated conference paper:
http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/aaai92.pdf
Most of the work was done on a Mac II with 8MB (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM.
The progress that has been made since those days boggles my mind.