The first real threat it faced, today's ridesharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won't even get ten years to … - Peter Diamandis

On many levels, Google’s moonshot factory is no different from a traditional skunk works. Isolation, for example, is also key to their process. “In any organization,” says Teller, “the bulk of your people will be climbing the hill they’re standing on. That’s what you want them to do. That’s their job. A skunk works does a totally different job. It’s a group of people looking for a better hill to climb. This is threatening to the rest of the organization. It just makes good sense to separate these two groups.

The negativity bias — the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones — sure isn't helping matters. Then there's anchoring: the predilection for relying too heavily on one piece of information when making decisions. "When people believe the world's falling apart," says Kahneman, "it's often an anchoring problem. At the end of the nineteenth century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure. People were absolutely panicked. Because of anchoring, they couldn't imagine any other possible solutions. No one had any idea the car was coming and soon they'd be worrying about dirty skies, not dirty streets.

About ten years later, in March 2018, Waymo purchased that fleet, buying twenty thousand sporty, self-driving Jaguars for its forthcoming ride-hailing service. With this many cars, Waymo intends to deliver a million trips per day in 2020 (this might be ambitious but Uber currently delivers 15 million rides a day).