Interesting too are the statistics that tell us that in English-speaking countries, the number of young people getting their driver's licences is falling, especially in the US, where the percentage of people aged 19 who have a driver's license fell from 87.3 per cent in 1983 to 65.9 per cent in 2010. It's the Gen Y and the Millennials, most of them male, who are walking away from the car. I've got one of these odd creatures in my house, a 16-year-old son who does not show the slightest interest in driving. This puzzles his parents who, in the '70s, couldn't wait to finally get mobile. The jingle of the car keys was the sound of liberation for me. I Am Woman See Me Drive! For my husband, a former inmate of a boarding school, his old bomb was the only way he could catch up with his mates, who were a far-flung diaspora, and there were surfboards to accommodate. Researchers are scrambling to figure out why there is a reluctance to drive in this youngest generation. High youth unemployment, environmental concerns, starting families at a later age and increasing urbanisation have all been cited.

Then there are the interwebs. My son is one of those who regards any interruption to his screen time as a pain in the neck. If he needs to buy something? Most of the stuff he wants is "virtual" – games and music come instantly through his smartphone. He's in touch with his friends 24/7 through social media and can do "facetime" ... Whenevs. If he wants to see friends in person and it requires 120 hours of supervised driving instruction? Fugeddaboutit! Not while there's a perfectly good bus to catch. On the not-small matter of teen lurve, Fuller wrote: "The young people who used to court in the parlor [sic], then on the glassed-in front porch, now began to do their courting in the automobile, or the porch with wheels." The first place they went for an unsupervised pash and fumble 40 years ago was the drive-in theatre. No way your parents could find you there, short of stumbling through the rows of cars with a torch and wiping the hormonal condensation off the windscreen.

Now we text incessantly. And woe betide if the phone is set to "vibrate" and kids miss the swift kick from the virtual back seat. Perhaps the awful memories of unsatisfactory sex hindered by gear sticks and handbrakes is one of the reasons we parents build houses with "teenage retreats" for our kids, replete with Wi-Fi, flat screens and fridges. We want our children to have a better experience of first sex than we did. And if it's under our roof? That's OK. Maybe our addiction to baby-monitor technology never went away. (Eeyew!) We are tethered to our children more than ever before. Truth is, we love it, and don't they know it. Friends tell me that they are still implored to drive across town at 2am to pick up inebriated offspring, even when said offspring can drive. And they do it. Stupid, loving, us.

Getting back to old Bucky, he leaves us with the idea of "enlightened technology". In essence, we want our technological advances to follow where the human heart leads. To be holistic. Our primary desire, as we can see from the take up of personal telecommunication and social media in every part of the globe, is to be deeply connected to each other. The road to the future is no longer a solitary road. The superhighway where we all hurtle along in our isolated rooms on wheels will become a thing of the past, sooner than we imagine. Just like the drive-in. This new generation can wear earplugs to tune others out, or engage on screens with their singular passions when they're in a common space. There's a new understanding that the irritating herd also brings comfort and safety. "Public" transport is now negotiable, because it's "private" too. Our children think less and less of privacy. This is the world they inhabit. The one we constructed for them. The retreat of our government from investment in public transport to big-ticket road infrastructure can be seen as myopic in terms of cost-structure analysis and carbon emissions – although there's no doubt that private cars will be the mode of transport for years to come.

However, that critical lack of creative thinking, addiction to short-term strategy and an inability to truly understand human nature will be our undoing. Like I say, what if they built the superhighway to the future, we looked at the road less travelled and, instead, decided to head down that path? Wendy Harmer is the editor-in-chief of The Hoopla.