It might be the most frightening sentence I’ve read that doesn’t involve nuclear holocaust or the possible demise of the Twinkie.

“By 2050 or thereabouts, most human-driven cars will be gone.”

Ponder that future.

Imagine that, within a generation, a fundamental part of life in America for almost a century — the ubiquitous conventional family car, operated by a person — would all but disappear.

This sentence is in a fascinating, and occasionally troubling, 2020 book by Anthony M. Townsend — “Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car.”

Townsend explores, over 255 pages, the future of vehicles that are driven by computers.

To be clear, these are quite different machines from the current models with their limited abilities — to stay within a highway lane and maintain a preset distance between other cars, for instance, or to parallel park.

Townsend’s topic is a far more dramatic technology.

He writes about a complete revolution of transportation in which humans become mere passengers, turning over to microprocessors every aspect of driving.

The concept is hardly new, of course.

More than 70 years ago engineers forecast a future when vehicles would be guided on their way by wires buried beneath the asphalt — rather like those toy car racing tracks that used to take up many pages in the Sears catalog.

(I harbored a curious fascination with those things for a few years. And by a few years I mean forever after.)

Advances in computers, which couldn’t have been conceived of in the 1940s or 1950s, have rendered that sort of system quaintly obsolete. We live, obviously, in a world where wires are nearly the equivalent of buggy whips.

I’m instinctively skeptical of some of the claims Townsend makes in “Ghost Road.”

In the same paragraph with the sentence about the near demise of human-driven cars by around 2050, he writes that “while the driverless revolution starts with a trickle, before long that slow drip will become a torrent.”

Cars driven by people, Townsend predicts, will be replaced by “a smaller, smarter fleet of self-driving vehicles of many shapes and sizes. Some will be private, some will be shared. Some will move a single person, some will haul a hundred or more.”

Townsend, who is the president and founder of Star City Group, described on the book’s dust cover as a “strategic foresight and urban planning studio,” contends that self-driving vehicles will save millions of lives worldwide by all but eliminating crashes, make workers more productive by sparing them from the time-wasting purgatory of gridlock, and combat climate change by making travel more efficient.

He might be proved prescient on each of those subjects.

But it seems to me that Townsend has more confidence in computers than their track record warrants.

The financial sector, for instance, has been digital-dominated for quite some time, and it’s far from perfect. Indeed, computerization has given thieves and scammers potential access to billions of dollars via methods more subtle, and more difficult to counter, than traditional methods that usually involved pointing a pistol at a teller or blowing the door off a safe.

I have great admiration for the abilities of engineers, to be sure.

But I’m not sure I believe that computers are so near as Townsend claims to mastering the immensely more complicated task of moving millions of vehicles across the country, carrying everything from students on school buses to the food supplies we depend on.

I hope he’s wrong.

Not because I don’t recognize the potential benefits of driverless vehicles. All the attributes Townsend explores in “Ghost Road” are legitimate. I’m intrigued by the prospect of saving lives, not to mention energy and time, by incorporating technology into transportation.

But I’m not at all ready to surrender the steering wheel to silicon chips.

And my trepidation stems from much more than just the potential that the term “computer crash” will denote crunched metal and bloody bodies as well as mangled megabytes.

I like to drive, is the thing.

I have since I was 15 and walked out of the DMV with my learner’s permit.

(Actually my affinity for autos predates that teenage milestone. I remember sitting on my dad’s lap and “steering” our old Ford pickup truck through a field while bringing in a load of firewood.)

I’ll be 80 years old in 2050, the year, according to Townsend, when human-driven cars will be anachronisms, equivalent to dial phones and black-and-white TV. And I doubt, if I’m still capable of driving in that distant year, that I’ll no longer relish being able to competently manipulate a complex machine.

Driving is fun, after all. It can and should be, anyway.

And it seems to me that the proponents of a driverless future might underestimate how many people feel as I do.

I suppose it’s easy to be misled, to assume that because millions of suburbanites begrudge the hours they spend in the driver’s seat of a car immobilized by traffic congestion, then surely most people are eager to let computers take over.

My commute is one mile. And about the only things I ever have to stop for are pedestrians and mule deer. The longest wait is for a freight train, and an automated car can’t do anything about that delay.

(Unless it’s also a flying car, something else we’ve been promised for decades but continue to remain beyond our grasp.)

For me a car equates to freedom — the freedom to go where I want, when I want to go, whether that’s a destination halfway across the country or a favorite hiking trail half an hour away.

Of course a driverless car could, in theory, take me to both places. And on the way I could read a book or check sports scores on my phone or take a nap.

I like napping at least as much as I like driving. But even so, that scenario depresses rather than intrigues me.

I have no objection to letting machines maintain a steady speed on the freeway, sparing me from a sore right ankle.

But for me, the requirements of driving well — the skill needed to shift and steer and anticipate the patch of ice on a shady curve — are what make the experience so rewarding. Humans have, since we mastered the wheel, derived genuine pleasure from the abilities that our uniquely sophisticated brains make possible.

To completely transfer so elemental a task as driving to computers strikes me not as progress but as surrender.

We are already tethered, to an unprecedented extent, to microprocessors. I don’t mind delegating mundane tasks to computers, which are quite adept at handling my correspondence and many other aspects of my job.

I very much want to retain autonomy, however, when I’m enjoying the unique freedom that comes with driving my own cars.

Computers can ensure the fuel mixes with air in the proper percentages, and even tap the brakes if I take a corner with a bit too much speed.

But I’d prefer that the steering wheel be something more than a place to rest my hands.

Or grab with the power of panic when the digital driver chokes on some ones and zeros.