science

I think this could eventually happen. I think people will accept fully autonomous cars, when they become reality, which won't be anytime soon. What people really want to do with their time, it turns out, is get a continuous drip of dopamine in the cheapest, easiest way possible. People will be happy to sit in a car that drives them around if they can just stare at their phones the entire time. Or, engage in whatever activity in the future that provides the same dose.

People would be equally happy to sit in a chair and go nowhere at all, too, if that were an option. And, many do. This future was predicted in 1979 in a short story, God is an Iron by Spider Robinson. And the same idea is also included in Larry Niven's Ringworld, where I came across it as a boy:

I knew about wire heading, of course - I had lost a couple of acquaintances and one friend to the juice. But I had never seen a wirehead. It is by definition a solitary vice, and all the public usually gets to see is a sheeted figure being carried out to the wagon.

The transformer lay on the floor beside the chair where it had been dropped. The switch was on, and the timer had been jiggered so that instead of providing one five- or ten- or fifteen-second jolt per hour it allowed continuous flow. That timer is required by law on all juice rigs sold, and you need special tools to defeat it. Say, a nail file. The input cord was long, fell in crazy coils from the wall socket. The output cord disappeared beneath the chair, but I knew where it ended. It ended in the tangled snarl of her hair, at the crown of her head, ended in a miniplug. The plug was snapped into a jack surgically implanted in her skull, and from the jack tiny wires snaked their way through the wet jelly to the hypothalamus, to the specific place in the medial forebrain bundle where the major pleasure center of her brain was located. She had sat there in total transcendent ecstasy for at least five days.