I did a poor job of providing examples of religious behavior, but as history shows people can believe and behave in a religious manner about most anything.  Including self-driving cars.<p>I took a comparative world religion a long time ago; I can&#x27;t easily find the handy behavior list we had to memorize.  We were taught something vaguely Mandaville-ian, I don&#x27;t know if that outlook is still current and cool, but at least you can find Mandaville&#x27;s opinion in the wikipedia.  The &quot;aspects&quot; section of the wikipedia religion article would be a good start.<p>Shared faith based belief in the inevitability of some rather objectively unrealistic future outcome, in this case &quot;We&#x27;re all gonna use self driving cars&quot;, critically based solely on faith.  A mythology, using the &quot;a story that is important for the group whether or not it is objectively or provably true&quot; wiki definition, where progress has always happened in the past and therefore will always happen in the future, when reality is progress only comes from obtaining and using energy, and our petroleum is running out while our population expands, so you do the math on the realistic future trajectory of progress, furthermore there&#x27;s no question in the religion about the narrative that progress necessarily automatically equals self driving cars, instead of &quot;busses and trains and subways&quot; or not commuting at all or whatever.  There&#x27;s a fair amount of superstition involved aka everything the general public or journalists say about anything technical, legal, or economic WRT the topic of self driving cars, they&#x27;re just making unreasoned noises at each other.  Its always accompanied by extensive and exhaustive ethical baggage, in this case about preferred lifestyles, the value of work, urban planning, as if the self driving car is actually important relative to VPN deployment or subsidized public transit or star trek style transporters, yet despite its irrelevance there&#x27;s a great pile of associated ethical baggage and related extreme judgment.  There&#x27;s a strong self policing society, where certain aspects of the religion are strongly amplified via endless ceremonial repetition, and the not-devout-enough are tossed out or punished via ridicule or otherwise.<p>Note that you can discuss self driving cars in non-religious ways, much as you can scientifically study aspects of a religion.  That doesn&#x27;t mean the adherents are not thinking&#x2F;believing, communicating, and organizing in a religious style or manner, that just means you looked at them from a non-religious perspective.<p>Some historical religions being a little hard to believe in the modern scientific world, doesn&#x27;t mean all religions are false; quite possibly we will have self driving cars in the future.  That future success won&#x27;t be a disproof of past observational behavior, under the &quot;walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it IS a duck&quot; doctrine of what is a religion.  Praying to each other for deliverance in the form of a self driving car won&#x27;t bring it here any faster, but if it does somehow arrive anyway, the physical manifestation of that idol&#x2F;miracle doesn&#x27;t prove the praying was the cause of the effect&#x2F;idol&#x2F;miracle.