On Saturday, at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, the future imperiled the past as executives faced a question with profound ramifications: What will happen to Geico and auto insurance when millions of cars drive themselves?

It was more than an abstract concern. Autonomous vehicles, led by the likes of Alphabet’s Waymo and Tesla, are already maneuvering city streets without human hands on the wheel. Insurance, meanwhile, remains an industry built on analyzing—and pricing—the foibles and failings of human drivers.

Ajit Jain, Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman for insurance operations and a key mind behind Geico, did not hedge his answer. “There’s no question that insurance for automobiles is going to change dramatically once self-driving cars become a reality,” he said, speaking from the stage in the shadow of Berkshire’s nonagenarian CEO, Warren Buffett.

What Jain and Buffett articulated is perhaps the most sweeping disruption facing a mature U.S. industry since Henry Ford’s Model T rolled out of Dearborn. “Most of the insurance that is sold and bought revolves around operator errors,” Jain explained. “To the extent these new self-driving cars are more safe and are involved in fewer accidents, that insurance will be less required. Instead, as you mentioned, it’ll be substituted by product liability.”

Put differently: as driving shifts from the flawed judgement of people to the complex calculations of machines, the focus of insurance must migrate from indemnifying drivers to insuring automakers, software developers and the labyrinthine logistics behind the code that keeps cars from colliding.

For Buffett—a man whose career began with National Indemnity’s insurance policies and has weathered the slow-motion upheaval in nearly every American industry—the prospect is both a challenge and the sort of intellectual puzzle that keeps him fascinated, not fearful.

“It’s a dynamic world,” Buffett said. “The biggest thing we have to worry about unfortunately is that we’ve learned how to destroy the world too, in recent years. We haven’t changed human beings very much, so far, but we’ve certainly changed weapons of mass destruction.”

Yet on more terrestrial, capitalistic matters, Buffett noted how the insurance game rewards adaptation, not certainty. “You deal with the world as it develops,” he reminded the thousands gathered in person and online, putting self-driving cars in historical perspective alongside switching from New England textiles to insurance—an early move that transformed Berkshire from a failing mill into an empire. “Everybody here is living in the luckiest period, but you know enjoy your luck, and you still try to figure out the answers to what’s going to happen.”

For now, Geico and its parent are preparing for an inevitable switch in the architecture of risk. Jain confirmed Geico and other insurers are “trying to get ready for that switch where we move from providing insurance for operator errors and be more ready to provide protection for product errors and errors and omissions in the construction of these automobiles.”

He expects the numbers at risk will change as well. Accidents will decline, but, critically, the cost of repairing the latest multi-sensor, computer-packed fleets will climb. “Every time there’s an accident the cost of repairing and bringing everything back to where it used to be would go up very significantly because of the amount of technology that’s going into the car,” Jain said. “How those two variables interact… in terms of the total cost of providing the insurance, I think is still an open issue.”

Buffett, always a believer in historic context, sketched the arc of the industry as he’s observed it. “When I walked into Geico’s office in 1950, the average price of a policy was around $40 a year.” That amount, he noted, can now easily be $2,000 or more, depending on where and what a person drives. “During that same time the number of people killed in auto accidents have fallen from roughly six per 100 million miles driven to a little over one. So the cars become incredibly safer, and it costs 50 times as much now, or thereabouts, to buy an insurance policy.”

“Sometimes, people look at the Buck Rogers aspect of [automation],” Buffett said, a reference to the science fiction hero whose imagination often outpaced reality. “But they don’t actually think of what really happens to the math of the business. The insurance—auto insurance—industry has been a huge growth industry.”

Buffett added a note of caution about forecasting the future. In a business shaped by risk, climate change and convective storms have made homeowners insurance in places like Nebraska so unprofitable that even doubling prices, adjusted for inflation, over a decade has not restored profitability. “It’s very hard to predict what these big changes mean and you just have to keep thinking all the time. But you don’t want to read some research report that says the world’s coming to an end or the world’s going to be wonderful because of this or that—because there’s about 50 other developments going on at the same time.”

Even so, Jain expects the migration toward product-liability policies will be the largest transformation in the field’s history. Regulators, wedded to the century-old model of auto insurance, may have to reconsider the entire framework—just as the state-by-state system of rate-setting and coverage will feel the force of embedded, manufacturer-based risk.

Whether all this portends a shrinking pie for insurers or simply rewrites who they cover—and how much they collect—remains uncertain. But as Jain and Buffett made clear, the rules of the road are changing. In insurance, as in capitalism itself, complacency is riskier than almost any other hazard.

“You never reach an answer in this business,” Buffett said. “You reach a point of action that you take. But… it will be different than you think. And you should wake up every morning and think about that too.”