That is not my experience or look at the history at all, wrt general-ish purpose technologies.
What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level.
At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enough" in multiple contexts) operating at "good enough" enough level in multiple verticals becomes profitable over operating ant specialized level and this is when the general purpose technology starts replacing specialized technology/personnel. Very much not all general-purpose technologies reach this stage at all, this is only applicable to highly successful general purpose technologies.
Then market share of general technology starts increasing rapidly while at the same time market share of specialized technologies drops, RnD in general tech explodes while specialized technologies start stagnating. Over time this may lead to cutting edge general purpose technologies surpassing the now-old specialized technologies, taking over in most areas.
> A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices. <...> By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead.
> everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars.
We are nearly two decades since the Tesla "expensive sports car" and pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option, despite massive subsidies. If anything, everyone at Toyota were right. Furthermore, they have been developing their electric drive-trains in parallel via the hybrid tech: surfing the same wave while raking in profits.
In fact, BEV sales outpace other drive-train sales only in regions where either registrations of those are artificially limited, or the government heavily subsidizes both purchase and maintenance costs. If you don't have government subsidized rooftop solar the cost per mile of BEV is more or less on par with a HEV and in most cases worse than diesel for long range trips.
> pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option
New technology often has ‘new’ tradeoffs, are GPU’s are sill only situationally better than CPU’s.
DC fast charging is several times more expensive than home charging which heavily influences the economics of buying an EV without subsidies. Same deal with plug in Hybrids or long range batteries on PEV, if you don’t need the range you’re just wasting money. So there’s cases when an unsubsidized PEV is the cheapest option and that line will change over time even if it’s not going away anytime soon.
AI on the other hand is such a wide umbrella it doesn’t really make sense to talk about specific tradeoffs beyond the short term. Nobody can say what the downsides will be in 10-20 years because they aren’t extrapolating a specific technology with clear tradeoffs. Self driving cars could be taking over industries in 15 years, or still quite limited we can’t say.
GPUs are a good example - they started getting traction in the early 2000s/late 90s.
Once in the mid 2000s we figured out that single-thread perf won't scale, GPUs became the next scaling frontier and it was thought that they'd complement and supplant CPUs - with the Xbox and smartphones having integrated GPUs, and games starting to rely on general purpose compute shaders, a lot of folks (including me) thought that the software in the future will constantly pingpong between CPU and GPU execution? Got an array to sort? Let the GPU handle that. Got a JPEG to decode? GPU. Etc.
I took an in depth CUDA course back in the early 2010s, thinking that come 5 years or so, all professional signal processing will move to GPUs, and GPU algorithm knowledge will be just as widespread and expected as how to program a CPU, and I would need to Leetcode a bitonic sort to get a regular-ass job.
What happened? GPUs weren't really used, data sharing between CPU and GPU is still cumbersome and slow, dedicated accelerators like video decoders weren't replaced by general purpose GPU compute, we still have special function units for these.
There are technical challenges sure to doing these things, but very solvable ones.
GPUs are still stuck in 2 niches - video games, and AI (which incidentally got huge). Everybody still writes single-threaded Python and Js.
There was every reason to be optimistic about GPGPU back then, and there's every reason to be optimistic about AI now.
Not sure where this will go, but probably not where we expect it to.
What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level.
At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enough" in multiple contexts) operating at "good enough" enough level in multiple verticals becomes profitable over operating ant specialized level and this is when the general purpose technology starts replacing specialized technology/personnel. Very much not all general-purpose technologies reach this stage at all, this is only applicable to highly successful general purpose technologies.
Then market share of general technology starts increasing rapidly while at the same time market share of specialized technologies drops, RnD in general tech explodes while specialized technologies start stagnating. Over time this may lead to cutting edge general purpose technologies surpassing the now-old specialized technologies, taking over in most areas.
> A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices. <...> By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead. > everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars.
We are nearly two decades since the Tesla "expensive sports car" and pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option, despite massive subsidies. If anything, everyone at Toyota were right. Furthermore, they have been developing their electric drive-trains in parallel via the hybrid tech: surfing the same wave while raking in profits.
In fact, BEV sales outpace other drive-train sales only in regions where either registrations of those are artificially limited, or the government heavily subsidizes both purchase and maintenance costs. If you don't have government subsidized rooftop solar the cost per mile of BEV is more or less on par with a HEV and in most cases worse than diesel for long range trips.