But the automation of the industry scared me away from it

It ain't gonna happen. People have these ridiculous expectations for AV technology and they're just not rooted in any reality. You hear "it's a computer, it'll be faster and it won't ever make a mistake." That's true, if you're doing a spreadsheet, but computers are still fucking useless at the most basic tasks humans are great at. You're taking the things computers are good at and using them to implement shoddy versions of things they're bad at. You take a neural network that's been evolving for hundreds of millions of years and replace it with a smaller and slower one, how the hell do you think it's gonna be faster or less error prone? None of this AV technology has materialized. The state of the art still drives like a drunk teenager getting road head while wearing a blindfold. And every single marginal improvement is requiring exponentially more and more money to achieve. It's just a pyramid scheme of VC money at this point.