We're still in the steam-powered days of machine learning

The reveal of the ridiculous Cybertruck design last week made me curious about the history of cars. If you look at pictures of cars from the early days (as I, a Normal Person, did last Friday night), you'll see some insane ideas. Before we got to the Ford Model-T that standardized car production, people iterated on a ton of crazy stuff. It took some time for people to experiment and agree on what a car even was, what features it had, and how it needed to work. For example, for a long time in the beginning, quite a few cars ran on steam, until gasoline began to overtake them (thanks in part to Henry Ford's standardization of the assembly line, which made non-gasoline cars harder to produce.) Eventually, all the cars standardized to the form we know today: a closed car, powered by gasoline, with four wheels, four windows, seating 4-8 people. Even the godawful Cyberthing follows this model.