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.

A cloud. Photo Karen Ka Ying Wong / Flickr

Apple has confirmed maybe the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley: it’s been working on a cloud service, and will announce it at the June 6 Worldwide Developers Conference.

So now we know annual developer’s conference will unveil “iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” but we don’t know yet what it is, or what exactly will reside at the domain name it may have bought for $4.5 million in April.

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?