A) I hope you’re right, but I’m skeptical. Look where the current autopilot is now... do you really think within 5, 10, 15 years we’re going to have cars with no human controls? Look at the progress so far? Sure we’ve come a long way and technology growth is usually exponential, but we’ve got a long way to go.
Your skepticism is totally understandable. I think it is hard for people, myself included, to understand how AI works because we don't really have direct experience of it. I mean, we have direct experience with how our brains work. We know what they can do. And we know our brains can drive a car because we do it everyday. But we don't have any real experience with machine AI. They are an unknown to us. So can this "unknown" really do what I know my brain can do? It makes sense to be skeptical especially since we know how difficult driving can be but also how easy it is for humans. We don't need to think about driving. For example, we instantly see a parked car and know how to avoid it. It is almost a reflex. But teaching a machine to do the same is difficult. The machine has to identify the parked car correctly, know the path of the car, calculate if a collision will occur, identify other potential collisions, figure out a correct path to avoid all collisions, etc, which we humans do all in an instant without thinking about it. People also get stuck on the "edge cases" and think "this one situation is super hard for a computer and until it can handle all these difficult situations, it can never be truly L5 autonomous." True, but we need to take things one step at a time. Self-driving cars will improve over time. They don't need to jump straight to L5 right away. Just look at Waymo. No, their cars are not L5 autonomous yet but they have achieved pretty good L4 autonomous cars that can operate in certain geofenced areas. One step at a time!
And I tend to think that AP is pretty good for what it does now. It will get better over time. Add the ability to see traffic lights and traffic signs, add the ability to handle merging traffic, etc... and AP will get even better. No, it won't be able to handle every edge case right away, but it will improve over time and become more and more capable of self-driving as time goes on.
But in 15 years, we will definitely see self-driving cars with no controls at all. As you even say, the tech growth is exponential. It is not just moving faster but the rate of growth is also increasing faster and faster. Just look at a classic log growth:
1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
The first generation was only an increase of 9 but in just 6 generations, it went from 1 to 1 million!!
FSD may take 10 years for the first step, 5 years for the next step, 1 year for the next step and 1 month for the last step. it looks slow at first but in the end, it comes very quickly.