If you don't want to drive, move to NYC. A significant fraction of the population there never gets a driver's license because they see no real need to.
I had an internship in NYC last summer, and that was one of the most amazing things about the city. I was glad I didn't have a car with me. The subway was excellent.
Google's CEO doesn't think pilotless planes are possible by 2030: http://www.longbets.org/4. Part of his reasoning: the FAA changes so slowly that if this were even all possible, the adoption and certification would all take at least 50 years. I don't see why the same wouldn't be true (perhaps on a smaller scale) for the auto industry.
Current airliners are exactly as driverless as Google's cars: they have an autopilot that does virtually all of the flying, with one or two human pilots set to take over in case they have to, just as the driverless cars Google is developing have a human driver set to take over in case they have to. (That's what makes them compatible with CA state law, as Google has been field testing their driverless cars for some time now.)
Yes, but don't discount the massive differences in environment.
An airliner is a vehicle with federally-mandated maintenance and inspection periods, operating in a tightly controlled space in which new vehicles entering and exiting are known and managed by controllers and in which the transport medium (air) by and large doesn't change characteristics much for the duration of the flight.
Versus an automobile with a robot driver that has to handle crazy pedestrians, dogs, motorcycles, cyclists and other cars randomly entering its area of travel, wide variations in road widths, speed limits, road surface texture (dry, sandy, wet, ice covered can all be encountered in less than 1/4 mile of travel), random road construction and other non-robotic drivers.
This doesn't mean that a solution is impossible, but to point to airliners to say "see, it can happen" is a bit of a stretch.
This is a misunderstanding of the discussion at hand. The word driverless in the context of this article and the person I was replying to implies the lack of a human failsafe.
Schmidt and Matt address this in their arguments. For example, Matt mentions that the beverage industry will skyrocket because people can now "drive" home drunk. The human can't take over in an emergency in that situation. Pretty much every advantage of driverless cars that Matt listed are not possible if the human is required to be alert enough to take over. Further, the person I was responding to claimed he would never have to learn how to drive. If a human is going to take over in an emergency, s/he will still have to learn. Point being, the discussion at hand is about driverless vehicles without using a human as a backup.
