For the past decade or so, we've been warned that driverless cars will change the world of transportation. This is all egregious nonsense. All that's been achieved, or is likely to be achieved any time soon, is something more akin to enhanced cruise control rather than anything resembling true driverlessness.

Today's "autopilot" (a term that only Tesla uses) it's really only practical in places where traffic is extremely predictable such as highways. Even then, the driver is supposed to remain fully aware of what's going on and take control if something goes wrong, because as Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety recently pointed out "these advanced cruise-control features Tesla has are not very good at detecting and then stopping for a vehicle that is stopped in a highway circumstance."

Every auto maker except Tesla uses GPS to prevent drivers from using "driverless" features on city streets and, as the New York Times recently pointed out: "Tesla owners' manuals warn customers not to use Autopilot on city streets [because] 'failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death.'"

The fully autonomous car envisioned in the "transportation of the future" is sometimes called "Level 5"; the most that's been achieved (or likely to be achieved) is "Level 2," which is essentially nothing more than advanced cruise control. We are nowhere near "Level 5," because true driverless cars require AI that has common sense.

Look, I've been following and writing about AI since the early 1980s, and there have been no breakthroughs in "hard AI" as it used to be called. Seriously, the kind of object avoidance that's available in Level 2 of "driverless cars" was available in toy robot kits in the 1990s. I know because I used to build them.

Folks, there haven't been any huge breakthroughs in AI; the "singularity" is not near; it's as far away as it's always been. What has happened are incremental improvements in image recognition, improved by the ability to draw on large data, along with "self-learning" algorithms that work inside closed systems with easily identifiable rules.

Social media moderation with AI, for example, is smoke and mirrors; the real work is done by human beings. Customer service AI is horrible and mostly useless. Voice recognition remains a joke; "autocorrect" is proverbially stupid. The "singularity" is no nearer than it was 50 years ago, when it was predicted first predicted to be available "in 10 years." Since then, AI with common sense remains "10 years" away. 

Here's the real question? Why does the AI myth (in its "driverless car" manifestation and many others) continue to remain popular in the face of overwhelming and constant evidence that it's just not happening?

I have a theory.

Throughout history men (and I do think this is almost exclusively male) have been obsessed with the idea of being able to create human life without relying upon human females to create it. You see the concept in legends of talking statues in the Greco Roman period, in the alchemical legends of the homunculus, and of course in science fiction.

Science fiction  examples of AI are are almost always sexbots (from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" to Scarlett Johanssen's "Her") or sexless eunuchs (from Star Wars' C3PO to Robin William's "Millennial Man"). Curious, isn't it, that there is almost an entire lack of AI characters in science fiction who have functioning male genitals?

Maybe when it comes to thinking about the future of "driverless" cares we should take aggressively macho uber-dudes like Elon Musk (and his thousands of imitators) out of the decision making loop on the subject of whether "driverless cars" are ready for prime time.