I'm looking forward to lidar in human-driven cars. Imagine how cool it would be to see the 3D point cloud on your dashboard or reflected on your windshield as a heads-up display.
Yes! I wish people would take car safety as seriously as they take high tech profits. Tens of thousands killed every year. Surely if lidar is a big boost to self-driving car safety it could also help human driven cars with the right interface.
Humans are really bad at scanning and interpreting large amounts of visual data. When driving a car, your brain is already nearly overwhelmed by the amount of information it needs to process and analyse.
I imagine it will be illegal for an actual human to drive on public roads by the time we get to this point, but it would be so cool to drive my car in third person camera like in racing games.
I think banning human drivers will be unpopular in most areas as long as we have a significant proportion of the population who has grown up in a society where the ability to drive a personal car is viewed almost as a constitutional right. Technology can change quickly, but people's attitudes change much slower.
What I expect in the next couple of decades is that we'll have certain individual roads and neighborhoods where human-drivers are banned, and maybe certain roads and neighborhoods where AI-driven cars are banned. Most roads will allow either, because it's not practical in most cases to maintain two separate road networks.
Being able to drive a windowless car by head-mounted-display is something we could accomplish with maybe some minor tweaks to current technology. I doubt such a system would be safe or legal, though, because a software failure could be fatal and we're really bad at making complex software that is also reliable.
