I view self-driving cars (along with drones, ubiquitous encryption, and distributed manufacturing) as "post-WW3 technologies". The same way that atomic energy,

I view self-driving cars (along with drones, ubiquitous encryption, and distributed manufacturing) as "post-WW3 technologies". The same way that atomic energy, computers, jet engines, and interstate highways were "post-WW2 technologies". These are things that could be done with current technology, but the current state of infrastructure & societal organization makes them uneconomical, and no single private firm has the market power needed to force through the social changes needed to drive adoption. However, they give a huge advantage to one side in wartime, where you are deliberately trying to kill people rather than avoid killing people. That gives the side who uses them the ability to win the war, which then gives them the political power to force through the societal & infrastructure changes needed for mass adoption. The war also gives the general populace widespread exposure to the new technologies, which makes them less scary to the winning side and drives political support for rearranging society to benefit from them (they still remain scary to the losing side, but they'll be dead). We're at peace now, which makes self-driving cars kind of a non-starter. But that's not guaranteed to hold forever, even in the near future, nor is it even true in many places of the globe (witness Russia/Ukraine). It also may not be the point - remember that self-driving cars initially came out of a DARPA grant. A lot of the technical problems with self-driving cars are easier to solve with widespread infrastructure changes. For example, you solve construction by mandating that construction diversions use smart traffic cones with a small transmitter that coordinates with the other cones in the area to signal which lane has priority, and then broadcasts that to oncoming self-driving cars. You solve pedestrians by having a proper street/road split [1], where pedestrians are banned from roads and cars are banned from streets. Heck, you can make the whole problem a lot simpler just by banning non-self-driving cars from roads. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad