Meghan Neal at Vice's tech blog wrote about how Google is now incorporating Uber into its map app. She then extrapolates between this addition to Google's map and Google's self-driving car initiative:

One idea is that the company plans to build a system of autonomous, on-demand robotaxis. And, of course, completely upend the auto industry and urban transportation as we know it in the process.

An efficient fleet of robotaxis is an idea that exists, my colleague Alex Pasternack points out, somewhere in that murky, buzzy space between Silcon Valley utopianism and pipedream sci-fi. But the technology is moving in that direction. While neither Google nor Uber has actually come out and said that's the long-term plan—and given laws and standards, we're talking very long term—there are many signs pointing in that direction, and today's map update falls in line with such speculation.

I've written about this shift before, and I think that in the very long-term, this is exactly what we'll be seeing. I think self-driving cars will change America in much the same way that the invention of the automobile changed America. In a hundred years, we won't be able to believe that we let people drive their own cars every day.