I remember around 2017 many people were buying into the hype that Uber et al were going to revolutionize transport; that no-one would need to physically drive a car, or personally own one, anymore because they were all going to be automated and all you need to do is to book one via an app, it picks you up, drops you off and away it goes to its next job.
A couple years before that, all sorts of reasonably educated people were saying the future of post delivery (implicitly meaning in the US) was going to be drones.
I remember thinking there is no way that would succeed in any western country, given the low respect people have for public property, and that the only place these models could work would be in east asia, where people recognize public property as things built for the collective good.
These were the same people that believed the hype that ChatGPT was going to revolutionize 'everything', not recognizing that the real prize wasn't in chatbots and enhanced prompt based searches, but in specialized usage in specific industry scenarios (like what China has been implementing).
I wonder if they feel silly, now that all these schemes have been laid bare as pipe dreams.
