When will self-driving cars be a real thing?

We discussed this at lunch yesterday, here are my predictions:

1. Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years.  But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

2. The American courts and regulators will not pin too much liability on the car companies or software architects.  That said, the regulators will move slowly, and for some time will require a human driver stay at the wheel, even though this seems to be more dangerous.

3. Mapping the territory, reliably, will remain the key problem.  Until that is solved, driverless cars will be a form of mass transit — except without the mass — along predesignated routes.

4. A Chinese city will do it before America does, but Singapore first of all.

5. In less than two or three years, you will see some American car dealership advertising “driverless cars,” but in a gimmicky way.  You’ll still have to sit at the wheel and…drive them.  But they’ll park themselves and have super-duper cruise control and the like.

6. The big gains come from everyone having driverless cars and that is more than twenty years away, but well under fifty years away.

Here is a related NYT article.  I thank Megan McArdle, Robin Hanson, Alex, and others for their contributions to this conversation.

Addendum: We also talked about whether “Virtual Reality” will be a revolutionary technology.  It will have its fans, but I don’t see it as a major breakthrough.  It makes too many people dizzy, and doesn’t really have a killer app; perhaps it will change sex however.