What would happen if your future arrived too early? If you got the keys to your first car when you were eight? Landed your first big management job at 15?

I’ve been asking those questions while playing with the Cr-48 laptop, the first implementation of Google’s cloud-based Chrome operating system. After a few months with it, I feel like it’s important, but I also think it’s from a future we’re simply not ready for.

I wasn’t long in the backseat of Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius, cruising smoothly down California Highway 85, before a sober, gray-flannel question pierced my giddy techno-utopian buzz: Is this legal?

On principle, it would seem downright churlish to penalize Google’s upstanding Prius — which kept letter-perfect lane position, following distance and speed-limit compliance — while all around us human drivers committed a panoply of illegal acts: talking on their phones, speeding, changing lanes without signaling, tailgating, you name it.

But what does the law say about autonomous vehicles?