I hope the rest of your flying time has smooth air and comfortable runways, and for many years beyond!
It's quite interesting studying some of the claims the autonomous vehicle people make; safety, traffic improvements, etc. There's also what's being touted as a virtuous circle between electric cars and self-driving cars; you need electric cars to save the environment, you need self-driving to make electric cars viable, ergo please invest megabucks into self-driving cars.
The trouble is that absolutely none of these claims will ever come to fruition whilst being 100% "safe" with the roads and other road users we have today. The danger is that giga-bucks will be poured into changing the roads, banishing other road users, simply to fulfil something that is little better than a religious prophecy. Such expenditure would be an acknowledgement that the original prophecy was unfulfillable, and that the most important thing had become to fulfil a heavily amended form of it even if that is in itself now not worthwhile.
Ask yourselves how many times governments have spent lots of good money on top of bad chasing an already dead and pointless idea, simply because they’ve already started…
Seen it All Before
The whole pattern of research, argument, persuasion, policy, law, and eventual retraction is an oft-repeated human thing. Look at the food industry; for decades the industry, experts, governments, magazines, etc. have been saying "butter is bad for you, it'll make you fat, give you heart disease, cancer, and make you go bald, cause flatulence". A lot of businesses made a lot of money out of trans-fats and artificial substitutes for decades. And then (quite recently) it turns out that the "advice" is rubbish, butter and the like is fine (even necessary) in moderation, cue the butter shortage in France and elsewhere as suddenly the demand goes through the roof.
How many health £ have been spent and how many people have died due to trans-fats? Probably an incalculably large number.
The Power of Lobby
Where there's money to be made, there's almost no end to the measures, arguments, research, advertising, lobbying, voting, etc. that will be wheeled out to create a market. That is exactly what Tesla, Google, Amazon, Uber, etc. are doing right now. Just like the smoking industry did, the food industry, the car industry back in the bad old days, the drinks industry today, the oil industry, etc.
The danger is that a lot of harm will be done along the way from here to there when we start seeing the poor accident statistics / traffic flow figures rolling in. The industry's end goal is to make it too late to go back before everyone has a chance to work out whether it's a bad idea or not.
With self driving cars, what I think will actually happen is that people will not value the inevitable "partial" solution enough for the market to take off, and it'll simply be too expensive to give it away for free.
The only company doing it properly is Volvo - they're saying they'll take the rap for collisions and accidents caused by their software. Everyone else is saying "Read the End User License Agreement".
Musk
Tesla are particularly bad because there's a lot of "Tech Rock God" going on with Musk which causes a severe and possibly harmful reality distortion field. People believe him literally as an article of faith (I know some who are like this). Someone killed themselves misusing Autopilot, yet Tesla are not even trying to nor claim to do a fully autonomous self-driving car (apart from their refusal thus far to drop the term “Autopilot”).
Musk in particular is interesting; Tesla does not make money, and they're only now finding out just how hard it is to mass produce cars; SpaceX does not make money; so what’s in it for him? His personal reputation is his way of making him money, and his co-investors simply have to hope that somehow Tesla and SpaceX will actually turn a profit (but for him that's merely a bonus). Tesla won’t, they’re building the wrong sort of battery (Toyota have the right battery, solid-electrolyte lithium ion, watch this space). SpaceX are unlikely to as they’re trying to make money in an expensive market where margins are already pretty thin, and they’ve wasted a lot through careless engineering brought about by cost and time pressures. Meanwhile their competitors (e.g. Ariane) are fearsomely good at being on time (my own experience of them is to the second, planned years in advance), on cost, and reliable.
People such as this can be very influential beyond their actual achievment, qualifications, or field of expertise. If Musk were to turn his gaze on the aviation industry, things may end up happening that you pilots would have a lot of deep concerns over. You just kinda have to hope that the barriers to achieving anything at all in aviation are too high for even someone like Musk to consider leaping. It depends on what he wants to do. Battery-hybrid aircraft - OK no problems with that. Tesla inspired pilotless aircraft - anyone want to get on board?