A big part of the actual value of "driverless" to :porky-happy: is using it as an extension of the privatized surveillance state. I've even had bazingas tell me directly that they want their future magic car to be "rented out" when they aren't using it so it's constantly making revenue for them as some wasteful version of mass transit with extra steps. They seem to want centralization through corporations and seem to want to be monitored and directed through the same but want that "freedom" illusion all the while because mass transit that does better for cheaper with a lot less waste involves being around the poors, and they can't have that.
Is that really all it is? Some techbro hangup about seeing poor people?
A lot of the attraction of futurism is actually conflict-avoidance. The belief is that new technology will make everyone's lives better, avoiding the need to confront power or to work through a nonfunctional legal system. How much we invest in trains is a political question, and political questions are unsolvable from their PoV. But that's OK because you can just invent your way out of problems, and everyone will like you because everyone likes scientists and anyone who doesn't is a luddite or an ideologue and not worth listening to.
To say that we already have the solutions to public transit or to climate change or to whatever else, and that they're just not being implemented for political reasons, and that the same political reasons will likely apply to future technologies that attempt to reinvent the wheel - that flies in the face of their whole worldview.
I've argued until I was seriously and truly exhausted with bazingas, offline, that kept saying "asteroid mining" as the answer to everything. Everything. Water scarcity? Yes. Carbon dumping in the atmosphere? Somehow, also yes. The pinnacle of the delusion was that just having more stuff around would mean more exciting bazinga toys and not a lot more industrial waste and further environmental destruction if nothing else was changed except more resources were allocated to the current system.
People often turn to magical thinking because the reality is we're all fucked.
You don't even need to be a communist or an environmentalist to understand that bringing more shit from outside earth with no clear plan to take out shit out of earth will just bury the crust in shit. You just need to understand basic mass and energy balances, but apparently the 1st law of thermodynamics isn't STEM(TM) enough.
I've even had people here on Hexbear tell me that being opposed to asteroid mining treats in the current sociopolitical and economic systems is some sort of quaint Luddite primitivist stance and not opposition to that much more pollution and waste dumped everywhere under capitalist systems.