What I think The Father is about

This is all spoilers, so don’t read if you haven’t watched the movie.

Self-driving cars and remote work

At first glance, it’s easy to think that they have nothing to do with each other. Self-driving cars are touted as a more convenient way to commute to work, but if people are working from home then it doesn’t matter if one’s car is self-driving or human-operated.

But in fact, what remote work and self-driving have in common is that they are both vehicles (excuse the pun) for enabling people to live more effectively in suburbs, exurbs, or even rural areas, and will combine to make big cities more obsolete.

People (almost always liberals) who advocate for public transportation claim that one of its benefits is that you can do your own thing while someone else does the driving for you. But with self-driving cars, you get the same benefit of someone else (or rather something else) doing the driving, but with the convenience of door-to-door service. Anyone who has any experience with public transportation knows that it takes at least a half hour to get anywhere by the time you walk to the transit stop, wait for the public transit to arrive, and then have to walk to your actual destination. And it’s a huge hassle on top of that.

Self-driving cars plus remote work means that no one ever needs to live in a city again.