>>>Whats that phrase "the plural of anecdote isn't evidence".
>>>The example of a small number of highly paid professionals isn't very representative.
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>My anecdote is just as relevant as yours, though. ;-) Certainly things change: in little more than living memory the telephone was a tool for the rich before a remarkable infrastructure effort took place to bring an individual copper circuit into every home. In the 1990s cellular brick phones were introduced for the rich before quickly becoming available to everybody as the copper wires declined in relevance. Soon inbuilt devices and tattoos to tell the robots what we want will be available for the rich before quickly turning into commodities for everybody. IOW the pace of change is enormous and sometimes we forget how recently mobile telephony, email and the internet changed from tools for the elite into a commodity freely available because you bought a coffee.
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>>>The future is (IMO) that most people will live in high density urban areas and rural living will be confined to the well off and the very poor.
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>If and when a third dimension is added to travel corridors (iow vertical space) then the size of the "freeway" increases by orders of magnitude while its cost decreases similarly. So 40 minutes on the Tube becomes 40 minutes of high speed automated flight or levitation or whatever to your place of work. Options and opportunities will change.
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>IMHO self-driving taxis and trucks are the baby steps, still confined to 2-dimensional roads as per the last 4000 years of recorded history, whereas Amazon's effort to use vertical space as an effectively free transport corridor, IMHO is a first step along what will become a rapidly developing travel mode in our lifetimes. It's not even particularly new: when 2-D transport corridors into Berlin were blocked 70 years ago, Western nations simply ran a Berlin Airlift to take its place. Before long planes were delivering more freight than used to be possible by train and road. Sure that was a more expensive mode of transport- but Amazon's point is that it's no longer true.

In the UK land costs dictate high density housing, even rural new build housing estates (rare as hens teeth) now come with teeny tiny gardens, tiny rooms and no storage space. Your change to distributed living might work in countries with wide open spaces but not in North West Europe.

Also on the parcel delivery front. Imagine a van delivering for Amazon has 150 parcels. Thats 150 drone flights. I regularly see multiple delivery vans pass my house every day so potentially hundreds of drones. it'll never happen. A more likely future would be most of the thing you buy get 3d printed at home or a local depot for more complicated items.