I feel like I unintentionally stirred things up with my commentary on empathy, so I'll skip responding to that part for now except to say that yeah, I know they're just my opinions, and they were formed from a position of relative safety.
Obviously, autonomous cars are in their infancy, but I think that to trivialize them at this point because of that is to ignore their farther reaching steps. When the light bulb was invented, it would have been easy to categorize as a more expensive candle for the rich, but it clearly brought about much more and changed conditions for the world at large.
Autonomous cars have the potential to completely reshape the commute, traffic, how and where cities are formed and function and travel. It's a bigger project than just throwing a GPS and LIDAR onto a Prius.
I agree. Autonomous cars can and will have a profound impact on society, in combination with cheap personal powered transportation like electric skateboards and bikes. The less time we spend commuting, the more time we have to care for each other, innovate, and stay healthy. When we waste less land on parking lots, and turn off lights when they're not being used, we will benefit. When goods and people are shipped autonomously in the night, we will save ourselves much stress and inefficiency. When the world is 3D mapped and sensed in realtime, we can spend less time worrying about the unknown and spend more time doing useful productive things.
Obviously, autonomous cars are in their infancy, but I think that to trivialize them at this point because of that is to ignore their farther reaching steps. When the light bulb was invented, it would have been easy to categorize as a more expensive candle for the rich, but it clearly brought about much more and changed conditions for the world at large.
Autonomous cars have the potential to completely reshape the commute, traffic, how and where cities are formed and function and travel. It's a bigger project than just throwing a GPS and LIDAR onto a Prius.