It's like saying we shouldn't have released seatbelts because people moght not have used them. Or maybe we shouldn't have released vaccines because you still need booster shots.
Safety features, even incremental ones, make the world safer for everyone.
the data already demonstrates that autopilot reduces collisions and fatalities. to argue that it doesn't put you in league with climate change deniers.
This needs empirical support. All of us are human, and are susceptible to false senses of security. Most of us are not good at assessing real-world risks and probabilities. If the autopilot software is good enough to drive the car successfully for months on end, drivers will start to trust it. It will be very hard to stay vigilant and aware, with eyes on the road at all times and an alertness level on par with manual driving.
In other words, an otherwise “good” driver can easily be lulled into complacency by a system that’s really good, but not perfect. It’s an uncanny valley that is worth discussing.
However, since the number of features is quite small, I'm sure owners will quickly get used to what the car does and doesn't do. The autopark and summon is surely going to run over far fewer children than human drivers do in those situations. That leaves just adaptive cruise control and lane changing. Well, if you forget to change lanes because you trusted the car, you still won't crash since the front crash detection (and your eyes) should protect you from that. So I don't see any safety issue there.
Numerous times I've seen pilots complain that their employer requires autopilot to be used wherever possible, while they would like to fly the plane by themselves occasionally.
If we polished off the autopilot to also handle take-off and taxi, and installed it in every single plane that exists, I'm pretty sure the entire aviation industry could be completely automated.
Without consulting the literature, it just seems easy to believe that machine-like consistency 99.9% of the time is more important to safety than confusion in the 0.1%.
Perfectly safe 99.9% and highly dangerous the other 0.1% may be overall more hazardous than human-level safe 100% of the time. Or it may not. I’m not making a claim either way. But it’s not a crazy notion that it may not be.
More data is needed. I’m cool with that data being collected in the real world with real drivers. Gotta crack some eggs...
