I'm actually moderately optimistic about self driving cars. I think, we will see large fleets operating with no drivers in good conditions (and low speeds :) in a relatively short time frame. There are companies in which people had been honing skills of building products with machine learning for decades.

BTW, a bit of a plug. I'm running a nonprofit/public dataset project aimed at increasing safety of autonomous vehicles. If anyone here wants to contribute (with suggestions / pull requests / following it on twitter / etc) - you'd be most welcome. Its: https://www.safe-av.org/ . I'm just starting it/trying it out - simple feedback or following the twitter handle would already be helpful.