Three major obstacles stand in the way of self-driving cars, and they are all rather obvious: the technology isn’t quite ready for the road, governments and traffic authorities aren’t ready for the rules, and people just aren’t ready for machines that do their thinking for them.

Of course, the latter has never been an obstacle for those who fall for political and health misinformation spouted from their TV sets or curated for them on social media by algorithms that err on the side of maximum traffic...