Isaac Asimov once made a good case for the proposition that the important thing about science fiction is not the technological advance but what people would do with it and how it would affect them. It was in "Future? Tense!", collected in
From Earth to Heaven (1965). He noted that science-fictioneers are stereotyped either as indulgers in weird fantasies or as farsighted predictors of the future. After discussing some SFers' successful, if limited, predictions, he notes:
Do you see, then, that the important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap-opera; not the income tax but the expense account; not the Bomb but the nuclear stalemate? Not the action, in short, but the reaction?
Thus, the important issue about automatic-driving cars is not those cars themselves but what happens to manual driving. IA himself once wrote a story, "Sally" (Nightfall and Other Stories), in which the authorities outlawed manual driving as needlessly dangerous, but not without a lot of controversy.
He is most famous for his Three Laws of Robotics, which are programmed into his positronic robots. His Three Laws were essentially safety mechanisms, inspired by his experience of numerous safety mechanisms and devices, and inspired by his frustration at SF stories where robots would destroy their creators. There are numerous problems with their implementation, and he got a *lot* of stories out of those problems. But the overall principle is correct, I think, and the Three Laws can be interpreted as three laws of tool design.
However, the positrons in his positronic robots were a technological detail, not relevant to the broader picture. He was inspired by the recent discovery of them, but it's rather easy to show that positrons are unsuitable for computer circuitry. They require too much energy to make, and they release too much energy when they combine with ordinary electrons. However, semiconductors feature not only conduction electrons but conduction holes, absences of electrons. Holes act something like positrons, but they are much easier to make and much safer to destroy.
He has some amusing examples of how not to write SF, imagining how someone might write about cars in 1880:
There could be the excitement of a last-minute failure in the framistan and the hero can be described as ingeniously designing a liebestraum out of an old baby carriage at the last minute and cleverly hooking it up to the bispallator in such a way as to mutonate the karrogel.
and
"The automobile came thundering down the stretch, its mighty tires pounding, and its tail assembly switching furiously from side to side, while its flaring foam-flecked air intake seemed rimmed with oil." Then, when the car has finally performed its task of rescuing the girl and confounding the bad guys, it sticks its fuel intake hose into a can of gasoline and quietly fuels itself.
I'm sure that many of you people can give numerous examples of these, especially in visual-media SF.