It would be difficult to find a downside to a technological advancement that saves tens of thousands of lives every year.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Technological progress is an indelicate mechanism, blundering heedlessly ahead over the bleaching bones of the last Big Thing. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, as it were, and that’s great if you’ve been invited to breakfast, but considerably less great if you’ve put all of your eggs in an obsolete basket. On the other hand, technology’s occasionally destructive energy can provide the momentum needed for even more wondrous advancements. Folks who like their analogies served philosophically can think of technology as Shiva, forever destroying a pathway to creation.

In learning to harness the lightnings, for instance, the peering classes ensured a brighter future for all succeeding generations and completely took the wind out of a globe-spanning whale oil trade. Hard-pressed to find a suitable substitute for whale oil’s essential lubricating and incendiary qualities, scientists bent to their microscopes and filled the void with petroleum distillates.

There’ll be a point coming along presently, and don’t think your patience isn’t appreciated.

The self-driving car may be the sweetest piece of applied science to come down the pike since internal combustion. The undisputed leader in the field is Google, and its self-piloting prototype is a marvel of artificial aptitude. It’s a Prius, of course, equipped with a roof-mounted 64-beam light-radar (lidar) system that interrogates the environment many times per second to produce minutely detailed, three-dimensional, real-time situation reports. Meanwhile, the vehicle’s electronic brain (dubbed “Google Chauffer”) reconciles that flood of information with the vast atlas of hyper-accurate GPS maps stored in its silicon hippocampus to propel passengers toward their intended destination safely and reliably despite the worst that Man and Nature can throw in its way. Fact is, with more than 100,000 miles under its seat belt Google’s self-driving sensation has come to grief but once, in a fender-bender that occurred while the vehicle was briefly under purely biological control.

If the “hands-less carriage” sounds more like George Jetson than Joe Sixpack, consider that Nevada, Florida, California and Michigan have all passed ordinances permitting the operation of autonomous autos, and more states are moving quickly to clear the road in that direction. The self-driving car is real, its technology is proven, and it’s coming soon to a parkway near you.

“We’re not talking about 10 years,” assures one scientist close to the Google project. “We’re talking about five.”

Getting closer to that elusive point, about 30,000 people die each year in the United States as a result of traffic accidents. About 90 percent of those accidents, some 27,000, are caused by driver error. Transportation prognosticators estimate that if just 10 percent of the cars on the road were self-driving, 1,100 lives could be saved. At 90 percent usage, self-driving cars could save more than 21,000 lives annually.

Moving right along, at any given moment there are about 120,000 names on the nation’s organ wait-list. Each year more than 30,000 Americans receive a donated organ. Each year more than 6,000 others die before one becomes available.

As it happens, car crashes generate a lot of fatal head traumas that leave much of the remaining biological inventory intact, making them a critical source of donated organs. About half of those eligible to donate organs actually do it, and one unfortunate donor is generally good for about 3.3 desperately needed donations.

By that grim arithmetic, 1,100 lives saved by Google Chauffer could add up to death for some 1,800 people waiting for an organ that’s simply not coming. Save 21,000 lives on the road and you get almost 35,000 fewer organs in circulation. For those whose profession and passion are matching people with parts, the self-driving car presents a pretty pickle.

“You can’t argue with fewer traffic fatalities,” admits one anxious transplant surgeon, “but then we have a whole new problem. Where will we get organs?”

The same place you get ersatz whale oil – you let Shiva provide. In this case, the Destroyer is poised to become manifest in the guise of companies like Makerbot, one of a handful of small technology concerns working in the embryonic field of 3D organ printing.

Yes, you read that right. Organ printing.

The technology for 3D organ printing isn’t markedly different than the 3D paperweight kind, just way more precise. Expanding on the established science of tissue engineering, scientists like those at Makerbot take, say, liver cells, and let them replicate in the laboratory until there’s a sufficient quantity of biological “ink”, which they load into a 3D printer, which “prints” a liver. If that sounds simple enough, you’re not listening right. Still, one major hurdle to printing a functional organ was cleared recently when researchers from Sydney University and Harvard made serious progress toward solving the knotty “vascularisation” problem.

It’s like this: Printing a liver-shaped object with liver-type tissue is a relatively straight-forward exercise. A working organ, however, requires a complex internal web of fine capillary blood vessels providing the constant flow of oxygen and nutrients it needs to survive, and “bio-printer” technology is still several generations behind the level of sophistication needed to print organs with pre-installed vascular systems. Instead of trying to build a better printer, those clever researchers printed out a complex web of fine filaments, coated it with a thick layer of endothelial cells, then carefully removed the filaments to get a vascular network composed entirely of living tissue and ready to be installed in any organ not so equipped. Of course, the hitch in that get-along will be getting the capillaries into the liver, and even the most optimistic organ printers don’t see that happening any time soon.

Still, the concept is sound, and as observers on both the supply and demand sides of the equation are quick to point out, the pressure to produce is about to get intense. As self-driving cars begin driving down the supply of transplantable organs, demand will drive organ printing research into high gear.

The point, at long last, is that when electricity pulled the rug out from under the whale oil market, the Mother of Invention compensated consumers with a far less expensive and far more versatile alternative. Likewise, when self-driving cars slam the brakes on organ donations, technology will very likely respond by ending the need for donated organs altogether. And it would be very difficult, indeed, to find a downside to that.