Nobel Nacre.. The nobelprize is hyper destructive to the scientists receiving it. Its hard to one up from there or return to your field- everyone is bombarding you with high expectations. You can only fail after you received olympic gold. Thus, as scientists inflict change on society, and society hates change, it is like a oyster, trying to protect itself from a grain of sand, wrapping it in Nacre, protecting itself from further change, by encapsulating the changing factor which remains neutered from its ability to do science.

> self driving cars are easy

Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.

Oh, until it hits an obstruction.

Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.

Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.

Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.

Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.

Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.

Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.

Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.