No, obviously not. Unless you’re the type to assume all cars are “self-driving.”
Having a flunky (or spouse or child) zap the commercials for you is not a terribly useful system for most people.
Having a flunky (spouse or child) change the channel WAS a terribly useful system for most people before remote controls were invented 
I just want to win the nickel 
Only if his name is Ed Zappa.
The difference between TiVo and (for example) a satellite TV DVR is that TiVo isn’t a licensee of the program providers. So they can do whatever they want, assuming it is legal (like allowing you to download shows from your TiVo for offline viewing).
On the other hand, an outfit like DirecTV is a programming licensee. If they offered a TiVo-like way to download shows, a programming source (let’s pick Disney, for example) might refuse to renew DirecTV’s access to Disney programming when the contract comes up for renewal.
DirecTV does go out of their way to be annoying, though. Your DVR break? Tough luck - the replacement won’t have any of your programming, even if you are using their external drive and connect it to the replacement unit. Each DVR has a unique encryption key. Far better to make it a per-account key (since DirecTV allows viewing from one DVR to another already). And don’t get me started on losing all of the series managers, one-off future recording, etc. - despite the DVR having an Internet connection, a phone line, and a USB port, DirecTV doesn’t provide any way of saving that data, either.
Back on the subject of commercial skips, one way to detect some (but not all) commercials is to look at the audio bitstream. My stereo has a display on the front, and much of the programming I watch is AC3 5.1. A lot of the commercials are AC3 2.0. Another clue would be the loss of the captioning bitstream - a closed-captioned show will often have un-captioned commercials. That isn’t as reliable an indicator, though, as the captioning can “run behind” the voices on screen, particularly if it is being captioned live.
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_detection
MythTV did a pretty good job skipping commercials when I ran the box. Used a blend of methods as detailed in the link above. It was really hard to get anything but antenna HDTV into mythtv for a long time so I stopped running it and just get the shows from Hulu or the websites instead now, but it definitely worked on the vast majority of shows.
Yup. When I was a kid, I was Dad’s “remote control” since I usually lay on the floor in front of the TV.
…on OTA broadcast. Broadcasters are still held to stricter technical standards and tend to conform to “old ways” in cutting between program and commercial, so it’s likely the majority of the commercial breaks you caught had black-frame separation. I’d guess that the technique would work reasonably well on OTA channels anywhere in the US, barring a few indies run by chimpanzees.
But we’re talking mostly about cable here, which is a whole 'nother ball game. Like you, I zap commercials by paying Hulu a whole $3 a month.