For driverless cars, it’s really more a matter of when than if. They may not arrive en masse in the next ten minutes the way Elon Musk believes they will, but we’re at the beginning of what may be a relatively quick transition into a world of hands-free vehicles, which, if we’re smart and fortunate, will be EVs powered by electricity from solar sources. This new reality will be full of ethical, legal and philosophical questions, some of them extremely thorny. But that’s the future, and it isn’t far from now. In our age, we’ll get to experience for years–decades, probably–a variation of what it was like when horses and cars (uneasily) shared the roads and streets. In the new equation, we’re the horses.

From Martin Belam in the Guardian:

Our cities must have been dreadfully foul and smelly before the motor car. At the London Transport Museum they have a display of two horse-drawn vehicles. Pre-recorded voices make it sound like the model horses are chatting to each other, and there’s fake horse dung on the floor for extra giggles. Whole sub-industries flourished in clearing up the straw and excrement clogging up our 19th-century streets. It must have been particularly grim when it rained or snowed.

I thought about this exhibit while trying to cross the road the other day, waiting for a break in the relentless London traffic. I watched cars whizz by, spewing out fumes that we know are toxic, and burning fossil fuels that costs us millions to extract from the ground.

It struck me how awful and primitive that is going to look in a museum display in a hundred years’ time. People stuck in movable boxes polluting the air, taking up all the space in our cities. The display will calmly inform people that by the early 21st century, thanks to huge efforts expended on safety measures, only around four people every day died on the UK’s roads due to cars.

That is the way things are.

But technology is going to transform it over the next couple of decades, and we can see the endgame. We know we are going to get to a point where nearly every car is driverless, and uses some kind of rechargeable electric power rather than petrol engines.

There will be awkward decades where the modes of transport co-exist, as evidenced by the fact that one of Google’s self-driving cars just pranged a bus in the US. But what is the exception now will become the norm.•