Dangerous attempts to fix stupid?
You can't fix stupid
That I agree with, but sometimes I have the feeling that by trying to out-engineer stupid we seem to entice stupid to play a bigger role. I personally think that the safety measures that the Autopilot brings could work quite well in situations where the driver remains in control (there are recorded cases where the car slowed down for pedestrians that the driver didn't spot) but I don't think we can ever out-engineer people becoming careless as a consequence of having this facility.
When ABS brakes were introduced, it initially resulted in elevated levels of head-tail accidents because some idiots thought it somehow gave them more margin to slow down - that has eventually settled (one would guess in a sort of Darwinian fashion). I see a repeat of the same here, and I think the issue starts with people ignoring the warning that this is BETA.
As I stated before, an active driver would have spotted something amiss because cars ahead would have started evading it, even if the truck itself was practically invisible against the background. Even the dumbest human being is still able to spot a break in an established pattern, an ability the driving AIs do not yet seem to have. We are IMHO a long distance from reliable auto-pilot facilities - they work, but we have no where near enough data on edge cases yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
