Henry Ford is credited with the cheeky quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’” But, people didn’t get a faster horse (which may indeed have been what they wanted). What we did get was a machine that literally—and irrevocably—changed the entire world. And it’s happening again with autonomous vehicles (AV).

We know that when “horseless carriages” hit the roads, not everyone greeted them with equanimity. I wonder, did people actually want something to replace their horses? Would we have been somehow underserved if we had just developed more efficient ways of juxtaposing urban development and the disposal of horse manure? Maybe we did just want faster horses.

We are once again being gifted with inescapable technology in the form of self-driving vehicles.

 …