We’re talking about autonomous driving ... specifically … how soon we can expect self-driving cars? And what changes will they bring in our economy and our society?

My guest is Blair Lacorte, the president of AEye, a Silicon Valley company that “develops advanced vision hardware, software and algorithms that act as the eyes and visual cortex of autonomous vehicles.”

He says: we’ll have self-driving cars within 3 years.

What we cover:

• Many experts say that full self-driving is many years away. Some say we’ll never get there. Talk about how you think we’ll get there in 3 years.
  
• You also say we’ll need to redefine what self-driving means … maybe redo the Levels of Automation. How so?
  
• What’s unique about your technology? You have something you’ve call iDAR … what is it, and how does it work?
  
• Who are you working with right now on this?
  
• Elon Musk says we don’t need LIDAR. Agree?
  
• How important is critical mass of instrumented cars and shared data to accelerate the AI that we need for self-driving cars?
  
• Robotaxis … will we see fleets of personal cars roaming the roads as taxis? Other models?
  
• There are those who say that autonomous cars -- and their development -- is unsafe. How do you respond?
  
• Anything else?