Pretty much all the design, engineering, and manufacturing of the driverless control systems will be done offshore. The only people who will profit from them will be the richest of the 1%. And it will cost millions of middle class jobs that will be replaced with... what? You can only have so many walmart greeters. This is purely the result of the top 1% totally running away with the entire economy. And the middle class and poor being so completely mindfucked as to go along with it like the good little germans did in the mid 1930s.
And the real killer is going to come when we get thousands of these things jammed together on a highway during rush hour. Just what the heck do you think is going to happen to traffic flows, when every single one of those cars will be following some stupefied program that says "increase space between vehicles to velocity in mph times 3 feet" every time the vehicle begins to accelerate in stop and go traffic. Traffic isnt going to flow at all. It is going to grind to a complete and total halt. You're going to have human drivers bobbing and weaving around all these stupid cars following their stupid traffic-choking programs. There is a reason there are so many damn accidents. It's because traffic flows together in a dynamic that far exceeds any reasonable safety specification. Cars are practically bumper to bumper at 30 mph in a traffic jam. They come to a complete stop, accelerate to various speeds, all the way up to 70mph in some cases, and then completely stop again. All the while many of them are practically bumper to bumper. No computer could match the flow rate efficiency of human drivers without building in so much safety margin that it completely decimates traffic flows. People who think that humans are such bad drivers are completely and utterly misunderestimating the amount of mental processing that occurs on the roadways in heavy traffic. Sure, like many, I'd rather not deal with it. I'd rather sit there and read a book. But I'm telling you that that convenience is going to come at a heavy heavy cost. In the end, we will have spent all this money and all these resources to implement something that only benefits the extreme wealthy, and costs each of us far more commuting time and therefore lowers productivity, not to mention all the lost jobs.
On the plus side, road construction spending would skyrocket, because the number of traffic lanes will have to effectively double to support driverless car algorithms in heavy traffic.
