They own the companies that DO sell products.
You're really missing the point. The "1%" you refer to, who are really more the 0.1% of wealth holders, do not sell things, mostly do not known companies that sell products, and would remain the 0.1% even if they stopped earning wages of any kind, assuming at the moment they actually do. Mark Zuckerberg does not sell any product, does not own any company that sells an actual product, and earns exactly one dollar a year. Part of the reason there are less of certain kinds of manufacturing jobs is because
people don't want those things anymore. The majority of the US economy is service-based, and most of the "1%" don't make anything, they make their money on services. And even if they stopped earning that money, they already *have* most of the money.
You don't threaten fish in the ocean by withholding the water in your toilet.
What I am imagining is millions of driverless cars, and I just do not believe that they'll all be perfectperfectperfect.
You are expressing yourself on an automated system connected to an automated system managed by a set of automated systems. Without those imperfect automated systems, you would be expressing yourself to a crowd of eight people from a literal soap box.
And claiming they won't be perfect is a strawman. We don't expect automation systems to be perfect, just better than the alternatives. That's why those death you think are irrelevant are relevant. We don't need perfect, we just need better than the alternatives. And the current situation would be horrifying if it wasn't so common so as to be invisible. More people are killed by just foolish human automobile drivers in the United States than are killed by all the automation systems everywhere on Earth. If automated driver technology failed at one hundred times the rate of aircraft autopilots, we would still save tons of lives a year with driver automation. Hundreds would die due to automation errors. Thousands would live that currently die. I'll make that trade every day and twice on Sunday. The notion that its better if thousands are killed by imperfect humans than hundreds are killed by imperfect computers is viscerally abhorrent.
This is not to say mistakes haven't been made in the past with regard to automation, particularly rushing to automate processes that were not well understood in the first place. There's as much hubris in engineering as anywhere, as any fault analyst will tell you. Engineering rules often are only updated when people die: thus the aphorism "code is written in blood." I am by nature a cautious designer and implementer of technology. However, historically speaking the luddites have always been wrong, and will likely always be wrong. Things are rarely as good as the optimists claim, but they are never, ever, ever as bad as the doomsayers predict. Consistently betting on the optimists will cost you most of your money. Betting consistently on the pessimists will cost you all of your money. The best strategy is to ignore the optimists and bet against the pessimists whatever they say. Do that, and you break the bank every time.