JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) — Most people assume their great-grandchildren will still be driving cars, but the fact is that the driverless car is around the corner, and so is technology’s latest assault on employment.

This may sound to some like a report about a UFO above Texas, but a driverless car was spotted this month gliding down Jerusalem’s main artery, the Menachem Begin thruway, containing a proud developer and a nervous journalist who thought he was about to die.

The fears proved unfounded.

Like Alphabet’s GOOG, -1.66% autonomous car, which has already driven unscathed several hundred thousand miles in real traffic, this Audi accelerated, slowed and braked according to what the camera on its windshield saw and the smart chip within it read. Next year, the lone lens will multiply to eight cameras that will surround the car and allow it to scan all its surroundings, and therefore move between lanes and bypass vehicles, said Ziv Aviram, CEO of Jerusalem-based Mobileye US:MBLY .

Mika Hakkinen: Why CEOs Are Like Racing Drivers

The 17-year-old firm of 473 employees and $143 million annual sales made headlines in summer 2014 when it raised $890 million on the New York Stock Exchange, the largest Israeli initial public offering ever, based on its original product, a combination of cameras and software that helps drivers avoid collisions.

Now building that system into most major car makers’ new vehicles, Mobileye is now taking its knowledge to the next stage, the race for the driverless car’s creation.

In that race, Mobileye finds itself on the side of its clients, the traditional auto makers, who unlike their Californian rivals Google, Apple AAPL, -1.59% , and electric-car maker Tesla TSLA, -4.14% , believe in the autonomous car’s gradual introduction.

Silicon Valley’s optimism is such that Tesla CEO Elon Musk thinks the autonomous car will be fully developed by the end of this decade, but even his conservative competitors agree it is around the corner. “No one in the industry doubts it will come in our lifetime,” the 56-year-old Aviram told the Yediot Aharonot daily. “Our children might not get driving licenses,” he added.

As with any approaching invention, the face of its era remains largely cryptic. Who, for instance, will be responsible when the driverless vehicle commits an accident: the road builder, the owner, or the manufacturer, and if it is the latter then which one: the auto maker or the programmer?

Such questions, says Israeli law professor Avraham Tannenbaum, will demand a new legislative effort. Yet such legal implications dwarf compared with the approaching era’s other repercussions.

With driving shifted to the machine, the number of road accidents will plunge. The reasons are simple: reckless drivers will no longer hold the wheel; the car, surrounded by a platoon of cameras and sensors, will see better than any human ever could; and the cars’ software will make them detect each other from afar.

Since drivers cause some 90% of accidents, they will become a thing of the past, as will their 1.5 million annual fatalities and 50 million injuries worldwide.

Moreover, there will be considerably fewer vehicles on the road, because a car that can drive by itself between two spouses’ workplaces will convince many families that currently own two cars to make do with one.

All this is before the more distant future, when the autonomous car will be so developed that rather than own even that one car, city dwellers will press an app that will deliver within minutes a driverless car to their doorstep and take them for a smooth ride to their destination rather than bother with parking, licensing, maintenance and insurance.

The coming revolution will also be great for the environment, as fewer cars belch less gas, and also for productivity, as reduced congestion saves work hours, as will riding without driving.

A postmodern plague

Seeing the good that all this means, President Barack Obama will announce a $4 billion allocation in the federal budget for the autonomous car’s development.

Ending car accidents, reducing pollution, saving work hours, and reducing people’s transport costs are no doubt the kind of causes for which any government should care. But so are this approaching revolution’s victims, and they will be numerous.

The driverless car will damage entire professions. Since it will slash the number of cars we need, it will decimate the number of cars we make, meaning millions of layoffs in this labor-intensive industry. In due course, the driverless vehicle will also put out of work millions of long-distance truckers, traffic cops, and car dealers.

With accidents nearing extinction, thousands of repair garages will go out of business, the number of car-insurance policies will plunge, as will their rates.

Back in 1991, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism described a future journalist who will emerge anywhere with a suitcase containing a satellite dish and video camera that could transmit print, radio and TV reports in real time from anywhere in the world.

It sounded to his class like science fiction, but later that decade they all had emails, then they had cell phones, and the following decade they saw the iPhone that soon stored that futuristic suitcase’s entire content on billions of people’s palms.

Since they didn’t see the coming technological revolution, those students also didn’t realize it would crush the profession they were acquiring and cripple the industry they were about to join.

Technology has already put out of work millions of manufacturers, postal workers, travel agents, journalists, realtors, printers, publishers, camera shops, and appliance stores to mention but some in the newly insecure class that is feeding our era’s political perplexity.

The driverless car will accelerate this trend. No, this does not mean governments should go Luddite and fight this invention. Yet they should think how to pre-empt its social damage. Losing a job of course doesn’t even come close to losing a life in a car accident. Losing a profession does.