You'd have to convince people they were terrible drivers and that driving was super dangerous to get most people to put their kid in a self driving taxi in traffic. I'd agree there is a cultural change effect in play, as cars were farcically unsafe (and yet still 1000x safer than horses) for the first 60 years of their use, but the business model where people switch to self-driving is optimistic.
That isolated individual decision making will be the thing that scales. It's a question of perception of risk/reward, which is very different from statistical risk modelling.
The AI/ML will be great, the products? Whole different class of problem.
I don't think so. All things equal, who wouldn't want to spend their time doing something more fun than navigating traffic? Whether it can be affordable to everyone is a different question, but you wouldn't have to insult anyone's driving skills to offer incentives for a switch.
Also, "self-flying cars" have about 100x more problems that affect adoption (aside from having virtually nothing in common with self-driving ones). Having to constantly generate 10 m/s² of upwards acceleration is really expensive. You can't go to work in a flying car. People are huge wimps about crashing. Basic stuff like this. I mean, I can't/won't stop you leaving the self-driving car business for the self-flying car business, but it seems incredibly ill-advised to me.
Aren't you ignoring the human failure modes here? If self-driving cars were safer than human-driven ones, we would definitely be in the positive, and even more so for "safer than flying". There would simply be no downside (in terms of failure mode/rate) to begin with.
I get your overall argument, but for this point you are ignoring precisely what you are advocating for - you are looking at the solution in isolation, not comparing to the alternatives.