For three years I’ve been writing at least once a week about self-driving cars and I’ve recently noticed a shift in popular opinion. The wide-eyed optimism of seeing Google’s cute-as-a-button robot bopping unassisted around a parking lot has been replaced by some ambiguous, malicious, unknowable entity, a shapeshifting Smoke Monster that ruins our lives and ravages our neighborhoods in a blur of carbon emissions and tail lights. Suddenly, we’ve started to appropriate the term “self-driving cars” to represent all we fear about our transportation future. Read more...
