Apparently I missed the golden age of self-driving buggies. When was that?

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Point is that things that people will "never want to give up" to allow for the new thing eventually become hopelessly old-fashioned things that only a few people want to do.

Depending on the intelligence/training of the horse, I'd imagine some buggies were basically self-driving.

I seem to recall a tall tale about a man who would regularly get shitfaced at the bar, pass out in his wagon, and his horse would trot him home.

Yup, i remember hearing that one of the big objections to cars over horses was that they wouldn't be able to get you home when you passed out drunk in it. Maybe we're finally going to overcome that drawback!

The "never want to give up" thing isn't what they're riding in, it's the CONTROL of what they're riding in.

Maybe when you leave the house you don't always want to go to the bar. Maybe sometimes you want to go to the store to buy some toilet paper.

And what makes you think that this feeling will never change? I mean, I feel the same way about controlling my transmission, but fewer and fewer people agree with me, and it's getting harder to even find a manual transmission every year. I suspect I sound like the buggy guy to the kids when I talk about wanting a clutch.

You're in the minority. My 1954 Mercury had a 2 speed automatic. It worked, but it basically sucked. Automatics got better over the years and eventually the general public didn't care about controlling their transmissions, although the modern ones are pretty controllable. People have always cared about controlling their transportation. I haven't seen anything that indicates that will change.

And that's my point. As automatic transmissions get better, less people want to shift themselves. I realize that I'm now in the minority and use it as an example of how convenience often trumps the desire for control eventually, once people get used to a technology and trust it more.

As for "people have always cared about controlling their transportation," all I can say is "citation needed." Under that theory, no rich people would historically have hired coachmen and chauffeurs, and folks wouldn't choose the train over driving now. Sure, even in the era of self-driving cars some will want to drive the thing themselves. Heck, some people still ride horses. Like horses, though, I strongly suspect that driving will be seen more as recreation than transportation within the next 10 generations. I imagine the controversy of the future of whether it will be legal to turn off auto-drive on public roads or if human driven cars will only be allowed on closed courses.