To be completely fair, the confusion is because of the marketing. You and I both know that Tesla cars can’t really drive themselves for the same reasons you outlined but the typical person sees “autonomous mode” or “self-driving” applied to what they are buying.
People treat llms like something out of a super hero movie because they’re led to believe it to be the case. The people shoveling in the money based on promises and projections are the root cause.
As someone who was raised evangelical in the very evangelical southern states, I think the American Christian religion has quite the part in pushing things for the country both further right and further capitalist. The evangelical work ethic combined with late stage capitalist propaganda create an environment that is toxic to notions like ownership of the means of production going to the people or the state being responsible for many things at all.
There’s a lot of contempt bred in working class people toward the government generally due to capitalists destroying its capabilities to actually make things better. This function is creating a feedback loop that is actively pushing us even further toward a blatant fascist oligarchy (as opposed to the secret fascist oligarchy that has been functioning for at least half a century)
With all that said, as everything for our country is pushed further right the left has been dragged in that direction due to the goalposts being further and further dragged in the opposite direction.