Its a very good point Stu, so much capital is wasted on unproductive nonsense whilst actual quality of life improvements could be made for a fraction of the cost.
Scientism in general needs to be completely rethought.
Discussion
science is not a religion
progress is made where people with money to invest want it to be made. a lot more money can be made from selling driverless cars than automatic laundries
driverless cars will bring a huge quality-of-life improvement to cities that adopt them, way more than automatic laundries imo
>science is not a religion
Tell that to the branch covidians, the climate cultists and the Keynesians.
Science isn’t being driven by people with money, it’s being driven by the State. Fauci was overseeing $42 Billion at NIH and used it to torture beagles and fund gain of function research after it had been banned.
The private entities doing large scale R&D are essentially all government contractors too.
Scientism very much exists and has only gotten worse since Rothbard wrote this 
religion is based on dogmas
science is based on provable and repeatable facts
using science as a means to manipulate tho, that is very valid, and unfortunately nowadays is common practice
but that lays on the misunderstanding that most people have regarding science, not on science itself
I don’t see like that at all really. A driverless car doesn’t even save you any time, you still have to make the journey. Now I get to spend even more of my day fiddling with a phone? 🤮 Like I don’t have that covered already?
Typical family of 4 generates what 60-80 outfits per week of washing, drying and ironing? 400-500 items? Plus towels? Plus bedding? Probably ~10^3 micro tasks per week?
What is that, 10+ hours per week of lost leisure time? Time parents could be playing with their kids? Time you can never get back?
I remember in 2011 the investor consensus was that autonomous cars would be widespread before 2020. It never happened.
Will they be widespread by 2025? Nope.
Lots of companies set out to do it and the vast majority cancelled their programs having never released a product. Many after spending >$1bil / year. Fast approaching $200bn invested and still no product on the market.
The effort would have been better spent automating household chores. It’s not even close.
Good example of this is the Roomba.
Sweeping and beating out rugs used to take a decent amount of time, that improved with vacuum cleaners which got more powerful over time reducing the effort and time needed and in recent years has largely been automated away with robot vacs which can do the entire task daily and return to base and empty itself, even do some crude mopping with an attachment.
I’m with you - automate household chores. The benefits that accrue to people will be far greater than driverless cars.