> Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.

I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent. Some people enjoy driving, albeit usually in times/places without much traffic. If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?

> Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.

Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."