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People don't like change, and it comes slowly. They are more comfortable living in the dangerous world they know, then venturing out into the safer world they don't. If you think about it rationally, it should bother you that so many people are not paying attention to their driving and realize that autonomous systems never get distracted.
Autonomous cars have not just been around the corner for decades. It's recent cost reductions and improvements in sensors and computers that have allowed it to become financially practical. A LIDAR might have cost several thousand dollars in the past and been bulky, but is now less than $100. My middle school bought a 640x480 digital camera for $3,000 back in the day; now a $30 smart phone has 2 cameras superior to it.
Driver assist technologies are creeping in and will become standard equipment just as Bluetooth connectivity is. This will get the average person more comfortable with slowly giving up control.
Finally, the whole world is operating on computers, so the "what about hacking" argument can be applied to anything. It's a possibility; and it hasn't prevented us from developing technology in the past. Almost all of my cash and investments are held as binary bits of data, and that is of much greater concern to me than someone hacking my car.
I've been wrong about the adoption of home networks, and internet on your cell phone. I'm not betting against self-driving cars, which are likely to be among the biggest advances in safety and productivity in my lifetime.
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