His point is that the remaining 5% of a problem can take considerably longer to solve than might initially be anticipated by looking at the quick progress made on the first 95% of it. A textbook example of that is voice recognition.
It's also not particularly clear that the costs will drop rapidly to zero or even to a level that leads to mass adoption (see air travel at Mach 1+, Segways...).
Your examples aren't very good, sorry. We're talking about adding AI, autopilot, autonomous capabilities, whatever you want to call it to already existing hardware. It's mostly a matter of software and you're a living example that it can be done, in 20W, with nothing more than stereo cameras and mics.
If I had to compare, I expect the change to be more akin to what Excel has done to paper spreadsheets.
Current voice processing tech is still very much worse than an average human, no matter how fancy the microphones and how much power it's allowed to consume from the grid.
Good sensors aren't cheap, the optical and mechanical elements aren't likely to drop in price soon. Only the computing power is getting cheaper, but harnessing it isn't particularly easy (we're not getting better at programming as quickly as we're making faster chips).
If you need another example, consider automated cleaning robots. It's a considerably simpler problem to solve, and they're still only a marginal product. At the moment, autonomous tech is only really used in well-controlled industrial environments. It will surely break out of there progressively, but chances are it will take a while.
we don't disagree in anything. i'm just saying that it will happen, it's a matter of time - 5 years, 10 years, maybe 20 years, but it's going to happen. there's thousands of smart people working on it, millions if not billions already invested and tens of billions at stake.
You're oversimplifying it and being a little pessimistic. Why? Because there's an order of magnitude or more difference in the complexity of AI of cars and AI that a human uses to navigate
It's also not particularly clear that the costs will drop rapidly to zero or even to a level that leads to mass adoption (see air travel at Mach 1+, Segways...).