Self-Driving Cars (1954)
From Total Recall and Minority Report to I, Robot and The Incredibles, autonomous vehicles have been a mainstay in the science-fiction landscape for decades. And, though you may be inclined to point to the Batmobile as the very first conceptualization, you’ll have to drive a bit further down memory lane to get to the first prediction.
Legendary science-fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov wrote a short story all about self-driving cars in 1954 called “Sally.” His vision of the vehicles included “positronic brains”—and they were also the only privately owned vehicles allowed on the road. Anyone who couldn’t afford one had to rely on public transit. In reality, the first self-driving cars were invented in the 1980s, but it’s only been a few years that they’ve been available to the masses and not in fully autonomous form.
