Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

Hell, I get confused sometimes in driving SF - flakey drivers, aggressively solipsistic homeless folks crossing (or just standing around in) the street randomly, bicycles, shopping carts, dogs, kids...

I want to see the robot death boxes competently handle less fraught environments before allowing them around humans.

And industry suggestions that the humans not in robot death boxes cede the streets to those who are? Ah, no. Cars own practically everywhere else - you can go play with your toy on the freeway or drive the damn car yourself around other humans.

Takeoff, initial climb, descent, and approach to landing are high workload times, easily holding the attention of the crew.

Cruise is much more relaxed and much less need for hair-trigger responses. My aircraft has audio and visual cues if an aircraft breeches a 2nm (or thereabouts) and is within 1000' vertically. Other than that, it's systems monitoring, weather monitoring, keeping up on the nav progress vs fuel remaining, and making sure the automation isn't trying to kill you, either subtly or acutely.

A vehicle coming from a side road has a lot of movement within your field of vision. When driving on a highway we're well used to the fact and expectation that stuff isn't stopped. When the vehicle ahead emergency brakes or stops you have the growth of size of the target to gauge by. That's not much movement, until the last moment when it's far too late to evade. Some stationary debris is much easier - it's not meant to be there at all - you transition to evasion right from the get go.

For a human in a car, the dangerous highway case is the stationary vehicle in the fast lane, maybe one or two vehicles ahead. When flying it's the other aircraft that's on a collision course. Neither will move within your field of vision. Neither is easy to detect as problem, until it's very late.

FWIW 4 year old humans often run into things. :)

The problem isn't "you don't have pay attention to X" it is "you don't have to pay attention to anything during normal operation". It is human nature, if not outright physiology that it is incredibly difficult to keep someone engaged, and paying attention to a task that they are not actually doing.

The problem with halfway solutions like autopilot isn't that they control the car some of the time, it's that they can, essentially without warning Stop controlling it.

Self driving cars will happen. But the current model is essentially "do enough of the driving to maximize the likelihood that the human 'driver' is not going to pay attention, but don't do enough to make their lack of attention safe".

My statement isn't "cars allow you not to pay attention", it is "systems like autopilot actively encourage a lack of attention", that's backed up by the need for alert systems when they have obvious signs that the driver isn't paying attention, like "no longer holding the wheel". If the system didn't in general usage result in lack of attention then such a system would not be necessary.

I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year.

Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy.

ON THE OTHER HAND...

We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers.

You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents.

If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers.

Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say.

The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.