"Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?"
You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?
These are two pretty unrelated issues, and it is a fallacy to compare the two in this context. It's not unlikely that the majority of transit in the western will be automated in the next century or two.
The technology to filter and clean water has existed since the Roman era, but its implementation is highly dependent on political and economic factors (fun fact: western civilization didn't match the Romans' quality of water engineering until the mid-19th century).
The technology for automated cars could well exist in 150 years, and its implementation depends on the cycles of industrial production and consumption. It's likely that much of the western world will have automated transit in 150 years, because everyone will eventually get rid of their 2015 toyota for a model 2077 automated Tesla-google car.
Yeah, so we spent a trillion dollars sending a dozen guys to the moon because people in Kansas were shitting themselves thinking about Soviet space superiority. Now tell me about the dozens of assholes who said we'd be terraforming Mars by now, or be flying between Tokyo and LA in 2 hours on hypersonic planes. Heck, tell me about DRAM latency since 1995, the fact that power generation is still dominated by coal plants that are less than 2x more efficient than they were a century ago, or the fact that the sexiest thing in aerospace right now is a company trying to get back to where we were in the 1960's.
Right, but still only twleve of us have been to the moon.
I think the parent commenter's point was that it's pretty naive to think that there will be no more human-driven vehicles at all. Change will happen quickly in some parts of the world, and other parts will take a long, long time to catch up.
Sadly, there's not as much financial incentive to get clean water to people often without the means to buy it. In places often wrapped up in corruption, war, etc.
With automated transport, the early movers could absolutely dominate the future of transport.
You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?