It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's both!
Either a car is safe to drive on regular streets without human supervision or it isn't. It doesn't matter what's inside.
You could probably imagine a scenario in which the cost of the self-driving kit (not the software, but things like "a LIDAR array") was something like $100,000. In which case maybe most private individuals are priced out of the market, but some corporations are like, "This is still cheaper than paying for drivers." But I don't really see why that wouldn't apply to taxis as well as kitten-delivery. And in any case, it's hard to imagine why the cost of an automation kit would not drop in time.
So I don't think there are too many plausible scenarios in which it is persistently the case that automated cars only carry non-human cargo.
Either a car is safe to drive on regular streets without human supervision or it isn't. It doesn't matter what's inside.
You could probably imagine a scenario in which the cost of the self-driving kit (not the software, but things like "a LIDAR array") was something like $100,000. In which case maybe most private individuals are priced out of the market, but some corporations are like, "This is still cheaper than paying for drivers." But I don't really see why that wouldn't apply to taxis as well as kitten-delivery. And in any case, it's hard to imagine why the cost of an automation kit would not drop in time.
So I don't think there are too many plausible scenarios in which it is persistently the case that automated cars only carry non-human cargo.