Luther argues against self-driving cars as a symptom of safety-ism that is not, as of yet, quite that safe; Rich argues against fearing the transformative future; Kevin argues that we are not going to be given a choice in the matter, and that self-driving cars will be imposed as yet another form of social control.
Self-driving cars are indeed worth viewing with skepticism during the transitional period when they are not fully or reliably self-driving and are sharing the road with human drivers. My own argument about the long-term future is that we have not yet fully understood the transformative potential of a world made entirely of self-driving cars, either Rich’s futurism or Kevin’s justified paranoia. I wrote a long piece in 2014 walking through 17 ways that society would change if we switched to driverless cars, and there is plenty to love, and plenty to fear: changes to car design, insurance, accidental deaths, military preparedness, disaster readiness, privacy, policing, radio programming, the drinking age, the job landscape for non-college men, the mobility of the disabled, and economic inequality.