Self-driving cars are probably going to cause serious problems for society which outweigh their benefits. The problems they can create are largely related to civil rights and liberties. The apparent business model for these things is to move from sales to service, which means: 1). The public's ability to get around will be permanently subject to the capricious whims of a corporation. 2). People's daily activities and movements will be captured in large data sets, over which they have no control. One of the things that worries me about this, is that we already see the government using corporate actors to circumvent the civil rights of citizens. (E.g., asking telecoms to store data about their customer's calls so the government can rifle through it at will.) Imagine a world where they have access to high resolution data about citizen movement. A suitably obsequious corporation could probably be convinced to deny people transportation too. Want to go downtown to participate in a protest? Sorry, the cars aren't going downtown tonight. In fact, we've decided that you are an undesirable, so we won't be allowing you in our cars any more. You don't get to object because this is a private company offering a service to you. They can withdraw service at any time. Self-driving cars, while heralded as a life saving technology, are likely to create a situation where people are completely dependent on a system which extends to them no rights.
Self driving cars are not a problem, they are symptom of a shift our society goes throw from a mechanical one into a digital one. The shift is speeding, as digital systems allow of efficiency, the issue is that this efficiency is not understood by the majority of people and is controlled by very few companies. As those new tools are more efficient, everyone not using them for what ever reason is left behind. As they are efficient, they are convenient to the majority, and so, used everywhere a social/economical pressure to use them is created. It started with PCs, and gave us lock-in of data into proprietary file-types, now we have smartphones the ever spying tracking devices that make people walk into things. While the programability of the smartphone is still being explored, we will get self driving -things-, cars, tracks, chairs, what-ever. On the side you get automation of an ever growing list of jobs, and you can't stop it, efficiency wins, you will get 3d printers, and you you might get the ability to download and print viruses from the internet at some point, it can already be done in a lab with a few million dollars worth of equipment, but bio-science is moving forward so who knows. Prepare for an ever growing list of "smart" crap, phones, cars, TVs, light bulbs, toasters, shoes, if there is profit to be done in putting a CPU inside, it will have a CPU inside. I'm all for computing, hack, bioinformatics will give us DNA testing to fit you with the best medicine, smart cars will result in less death on the roads, and so on. The issue is not with the technology, it's with how it is created and who owns it. Because very, very soon Google is going be controlling a shit load of cars traveling at 80-100[KPH], at their full control, with the ability to literally kill and cripple people everywhere, intentionally, a power which for better or worse used to belong only at the hand of governments, and they were mostly limited by boarders. On the other hand we have FOSS movement that is trying to empower people (somewhat) with computers, but a lot of battles are lost. Sorry for the ramble.
Except: Cell phones. All of these things could have been said about cell phones (or other technologies), and we have dealt with them reasonably when they came up. Self-driving cars are an incremental step. Think of them more as an above-ground subway, and I think you are closer to the truth of the matter.
Smartphone do have negative affects on society, they allow constant surveillance and due to their efficiency it's harder and harder not to use one.
An incremental step to what? New technology brings with it the potential to cause serious social problems. I think most of the serious potential problems associated with self-driving cars have been overlooked by most people interested in automation. I think that serious consideration should be given to the negative implications of this technology. I don't really think that the potential problems which I have raised have been seriously addressed. Most of the ethical discussions surrounding self-driving cars seem to be concerned with who should get squished. When it seems to me, the questions of "Who should have control over the fleets?" and "What sort of consumer rights acquiescence is warranted?" are far bigger problems. Also, I don't think cell phones are a good example of reasonably dealing with techno-political problems. Today, cell phones are a part of the massive-passive surveillance infrastructure which governments and their corporate partners have been diligently building for the last 20 years. Very little has been done to address that and that has serious implications for stable liberal democracies.