Not far enough indeed.

I dont need all my entertainment as physical controls but I do at least want volume - and that is totally justifiable as a safety consideration too. Sometimes you need to mute it quickly if you think you heard something of concern on the road, or if you are like me, just to concentrate on driving when things get tricky!

There are so many other items you can apply similar safety arguments for:

Blowers and demisters - you shouldn’t be messing around in a touchscreen when you see your windows starting to fog

Cabin temperature - Uncomfortable driver = distracted driver

In my opinion, the place to draw the line should be this:

If the need to interact with the feature is triggered by external road conditions it MUST be physical. (Example: wipers, heating, blowers, all headlight and fog light controls, enable or diasable lane assist, cruise control)

If the driver has the ability to themselves choose when to engage with the feature and can do it only when safe, then it can be fully touchscreen. (Example: satnav route, fuel economy settings, electric seat position)

And then when you’ve got an ultrawide monitor but the pre-rendered cutscenes are hard-encoded at 16:9 resolution, so you get black bars…

Quite bizarrely, the recent Silent Hill remake has in-engine cutscenes (not prerendered) but STILL has black bars on the sides during them, because the game intentionally adds overlays only during cutscenes! There’s an unofficial patch to fix it.

I can only assume they did this because the camera positioning and “cinematography” was done with a 16:9 screen in mind, and when the view is wider you might see more/different things than the creators wanted. Feels so undesirable as a player, though!

I’m sure part of it was audience understanding, but the surely bigger part is that it just made for better television.

If the doctor COULD be copied, then any time the medbay was busy they’d just fire up a second one of him, or a third. And if he “died” they would spin him up again from a backup, no biggie!

It massively reduces the dramatic stakes when one of your main characters is easily replaceable.

Of course, there are always exceptions - but only when the plot benefits from exceptions - like the backup Doctor in the future, or when (human) Riker got cloned in a transporter accident.

So I suppose we can say the general storytelling rule across all of fiction is “There is only one of any character, unless there is a interesting plot reason for there to be more.”