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Seriously, friends. You suck at driving. Get a computer behind the wheel to save your life

Cuddles

"Better driver augmentation rather than driver automation makes sense"

What confuses me is why people insist on thinking there's a difference. It reminds me rather sadly of creationists who insist on distinguishing between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Even creationists can't deny the many changes we can see actively happening in organisms on a human timescale, so they came up with the rather odd idea that small changes are incapable of adding up to big changes - even if we can see some changes as they happen, they can never amount to a whole new species.

Cars are really no different. Augmentation is simply a step along the way to full automation. If you keep automating more and more parts of the driving process, it's pretty much inevitable that you will eventually find the driver is no longer actually necessary, or is even actively detrimental. It's not easy to say how quickly it will happen, and personally I think most proponents of automatic cars are far too optimistic on that front, but it truly baffles me how people can see a constant stream of automation being added - ABS, cruise control, active cruise control and automatic braking, lane warnings, automatic lane steering, automatic parking, etc., etc. - and yet still insist that there must be some vital spark that can never be reproduced artificially.

Focusing on incrementally adding more augmentation until we can take the drivers away rather than trying to jump directly to full automation may well make sense, but saying we should go with augmentation instead of automation really doesn't.

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