First, if you believe /. would be embarrassed by the vapidity of this article, you haven't been paying attention to slashdot for a decade.
Second, while I feel the pressure for autonomous vehicles is mounting, I'm still wondering how we as a US society are going to resolve the unstoppable force vs immovable object issue of lawyers and liability. FWIW I fully agree with you that the *huge* bulk of accidents are human error and likely already the software error-rate (which isn't zero) is better than humans, collectively, for average-simple situations.
The *FIRST* time one of these autonomous cars kills someone, there are going to be a string of lawsuits up the chain of indemnity from the carmaker, to the design engineers, to the software companies. All these big-pockets will have lawyers schooling like tuna, and - likely - there WILL be recognized liability* for the implementation systems, meaning big dollars, meaning more incentive for the next wave of suits.
*my guess will be that the legal system will punt it down to the individual, claiming that as the operator of a vehicle, the decision to use an autonomous driver agent is YOUR choice involving you willingly (carelessly/irresponsibly, depending on how bloody and gruesome the death(s)) giving up control of the car. So if you take that house in the exurbs, and decide to snooze for an hour on your way in, when your car runs someone over it's not Google or the carmaker's fault, but yours.
Thirdly, there are some other follow-on effects that I've considered.
- Traffic tickets - annual tickets issued for moving violations in the US are something around $6 billion that usually funds local cop shops. Now, granted, that will ostensibly/eventually be offset with fewer cops needed to 'watch' highways, sure, but the fact is that all those cops sitting with their radar guns whiling away the hours making dollars are STILL AVAILABLE for more pressing law enforcement emergencies. As a society, we have to understand that taking away the 'idle hours' of cop services gunning speeders takes away some alert-response capabilities too.
- gasoline - electric cars are NOT ready for prime time, and taking away the opportunity cost of long car trips pretty much removes the only real barrier constraining gas usage (which, let's face it, is cheaper than milk per gallon in most places). So now everyone doesn't care that their commute is 80 miles instead of 10? I bet the environment still cares? I've seen essays that talk about the 'end of the personal car', meaning these autonomous units just toodle around like a non-rapey uber driver waiting for a call for use. Which uses more gas: driving to something, parking for 8 hours turning the car off, and driving home, or a car running all over and sitting idling the whole time? I genuinely don't know.
- intoxication: the fear of drunk-driving, and the relative complexity of going out drinking in a car culture is likely acting as a brake on some people's drinking.
I don't know, there are TONS of implications. This could have been a masters-thesis level article, but yeah, it was vapid.