SINGAPORE - Ford and Volkswagen are shutting down their Argo AI joint effort to develop self-driving cars because “the auto industry’s large-scale profitable commercialization of Level 4 advanced driver assistance systems will be further out than originally anticipated,” Ford announced on October 26. There will be more of these failures in 2023 and there will also be more cities trying to refuse driverless vehicles, just as San Francisco recently did. I have argued for years that even if the safety problem is solved, robotaxis, like their manually driven ride hailing vehicles, increase congestion and thus cities such as San Francisco will try to reject autonomous vehicles even as they are overruled by states.

Healthcare moonshots will also continue to fail. Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton’s prediction in 2016 that radiologists would be replaced in five years did not come true then, and it will not come true in 2023 either. Just as Watson, IBM’s moonshot, failed, similar moonshots in healthcare are also likely to fail.