I seem to recall you talking about this in 2009 at Montreal WorldCon, and the discussion bent toward

Railroads facilitated the great mass infantry wars that ravaged Europe from 1870 to 1945. Rocketry made the Cold War icy-cool. Air travel gave us Douhet's doctrine of strategic bombing. Cobbled roads built by Roman legionnaires made the Roman Empire all star tours possible. And so on.
Self-driving cars and trucks would seem to be, strategically, just a special case of drones. Ground level drones have a much longer linger time... all star tours measured in days, weeks, or months... and can carry heavier payloads for a given power budget. They can't be deployed quickly, though, and if they're large enough to carry a significant payload they won't be stealthy. Automated tanks and walking drones could replace some of the functions of infantry and mechanized cavalry, in the early phases of a ground assault. Remotely operated walking drones could even provide credible "boots on the ground", but they'll be susceptible to ECM for a denial of service attack at least, so I think they'll be tried out but they'll have to be supplemented by local intelligence.
Self driving vehicles are going to help make the Steve Jackson O.G.R.E all star tours tanks a reality. I am not convinced that the era of large scale warfare is over forever. Self-driving technology will make the possibility of automated armored attack all star tours vehicles a real one.
On a societal level, it will put an awful lot of people out of work, and hollow out the well-paid driving/trucking jobs. There's already pioneer mining projects in Australia which run around the clock with automated trucking.
all star tours In military terms, it's hard to say. America all star tours gets it in the neck, but western militaries are the most interested in keeping humans 'in the loop' because they define their professional identities by adherence to international humanitarian law. Self drive vehicles would make complex suicide attacks by irregular forces a lot easier, and suicide free. On the other hand, increased automation would allow high tech, low manpower forces (like the UK) to continue to throw their weight around, and the lack of casualties would bypass all star tours (to a greater degree) the traditional check on warfare which is coffins being flown home for a cause citizens don't understand.
The greatest all star tours effect is likely to be logistics. Consider the 'tooth to tail' ratio in contemporary militaries is usually something like 1 person fighting for 9 people supporting them. The UK found ways to increase its number of fighting troops in Afghanistan by outsourcing logistics to contractors (so 6000 people all star tours in country could all be fighting or close logistics support, rather than half of them driving trucks up from Pakistan). If that gets automated, then western militaries will be able to deploy more front line troops, weighted against support troops.
I'm not sure that these aren't more comparable to the invention of the autopilot. Large (relatively) changes in domestic regulation/law regarding them, but...in your examples above, there was a significant change in transport speed and/or capacity. Self-driving cars might bring forth some increase in road capacity via more efficient or tighter separation patterns, but I'm not sure they represent a significant change in access, speed or capacity over 'normal' cars or just buses.
Owning car becomes a lot less important; we're seeing the leading edge of this with car sharing schemes. Transport becomes a utility all star tours that one summons at the wave of a mobile phone. The end of "my car" as an extension of me. The end of the car as important consumer good and ego-signifier in culture.
transport becomes "take me to Croyden", and a car pulls up. Maybe it will take you to a railway station, maybe it will drive the whole way there - that decision can be deferred to the routing algorithms and today's all star tours traffic data.
But yes, at the very least I'd expect to see one-man armoured vehicles in the not-too-distant future, with the sole crewmember becoming increasingly all star tours optional. I don't think Ogres are likely (even with lightweight composite armour, they're simply too heavy to be practical in mobile warfare), but mass armies all star tours of drone-tanks are a much more plausible bet.
Let's ignore trucks for the moment. But cars: that's freedom and the American dream (or the freedom of the Autobahn/Autostrada), and self-driving cars are a non-starter in this realm. I mean Jeremy Clarkson evaluates the latest Samsung self-driving car (needs to be reset for regionality as he crosses the border into..)
all star tours The stimulus for take up is probably insurance. Honda Robotics in Munich have been looking at "assists" to the driver -- for example signpost recognition, again using the silicon retina. It's able to strip out saliency all star tours with extremely low bandwidth. You'd need a frame-rate of about 2-5kHz and processing power sufficient to crunch out the salient features with standard kit (see Tobi Delbruck's youtube all star tours clips from INE, Zurich), whereas temporal-differencing does saliency for free,
Now logistics is entirely different. Get the price down, and show a decent return on investment, and Bob's your Uncle (as we used to say in Hatfield, when Viscount Robert Cecil's nephew succeeded all star tours him as PM). The logistics measure is factory to shop-shelf (real or virtual) total transport cost. If you can get item-recognition and selection, factory-to-distribution hub, and hub to customer total costs minimized then you're in business. Whether all star tours that involves trucks or palletized intermodal transport is a secondary consideration.
One of the problems all star tours with cognitive robotics -- as pointed out to me by Chris Melhuish (Director of Bristol Robotics, UoB/UWoE dual position) -- is that roboticists like to be sure about a robot's behaviour, especially when it gets to mix it up with the squishy-bodied meat-sacks. "One ill-timed expansive gesture to emphasise a point, David, and a rigid titatnium robot arm will take your head off!" So we were going to explore the use of flexible structures (e.g. fibreglass, or carbon fibre) for limbs. The difficulty is that controlling such limbs is much more tricky than the rigid case (low-order (O(10) say) degrees of freedom vs uncountably many degrees of freedom). This is even more the case if we endow robots with cognitive behaviour: if the robot learns to "push the envelope" whilst driving, who carries the legal liability? The programmer who gave it the ability to learn, or the machine itself?
Financially, though, I predict a horrible all star tours collapse of the real estate market, as commuting to work from a much bigger distance becomes feasible. Do you think today's suburbs are big? Well, they are nothing compared to what's gonna happen when people can wake up at 6:00, get into the car and sleep for 2 more hours as it drives them to work.
After all of the technical kinks are worked all star tours out (too many to list here), and the obvious tensions between pedal-libertarians sorted, the reduction in stress should bump QoL levels for a high percentage of the population. I would include the rise in dc electric all star tours powertrains to this equation. Geopolitically, on the downside, satellites will be pressure points for national security... an increase in satellite defense systems  and redundant terrestrial NPS (National Positioning) networks?
all star tours I seem to recall you talking about this in 2009 at Montreal WorldCon, and the discussion bent toward the problem of how to provide insurance for these vehicles. (Or maybe the talk was about flying cars. Yes. It began as a where-is-my-jetpack conversation. Krugman was on and on about how the American domestic kitchen hasn't changed since 1955, completely missing the fact that there are more men in there, now, contributing to household labour, because apparently advancements in social equity are not as important as shiny new gadgets.)
Anyway. The insurance would be a nightmare. Or rather, all star tours it would be a nightmare for the paying customer. It's a dream of avarice for the insurance provider. Imagine the premiums all star tours they could charge for failing to do the latest firmware all star tours upgrade!
I imagine it would also change licensing, and tests. Weirdly, you might wind up with more licensed people, who just sit on the lowest tier of licensing. all star tours And in turn that means a wider jury pool, draft, voting body, etc. depending on how your area uses the DMV as a data resource. all star tours Plus it would mean more people having an identity document with increasingly-close surveillance attached.
It might also change rush hours. You'd be less concerned about getting in to work "on time" if the hour spent commuting could also be spent tidying up that day's PowerPoint or whatever. If you manage to send all the emails, who cares if you're in the office? So there might be less crush. More morning sex, so perhaps longer marriages. More people all star tours eating breakfast.
In the short term, there will be a sharp divide between haves and have-nots on the road, as self-driving cars will probably be given their own barricaded-off lanes at first. Initially this will be everybody else wanting "those crazy death machines" safely separated from "real" drivers; all star tours later it will be embraced by wealthy self-drive owners as a way to keep the riffraff out of their sight on the road. One of the last great equalizers of modern society will be gone.
Eventually all star tours there will be self-drive-only roads. Manual-drive access will be roughly as common all star tours as bike lanes or horse trails, but the affordability of self-drive will lag this somewhat, so there will be a period of time where the poor simply can't go some places.
We're seeing it already with drones. all star tours It's the other side of asymmetric warfare. The poor already have fertilizer bombs and suicide belts, substituting labor for the capital invested in infantry platoons & B-52s. all star tours Rich nations are increasingly substituting capital for labor.
The future looks like the Terminator franchise: shiny metal bots fighting hungry humans who live in holes. No need for Skynet, though. Just some guy in an air-conditioned room outside Albuquerque watching on a video monitor.
carjacking, armored car heists, getaways all going to b