Automation
The subject of aircraft automation has been a hot topic in the aviation and avionics circles for some years and is just as relevant to vehicles, if not more so, given the density of vehicular traffic is orders of magnitude higher than that of aircraft.
In addition, passenger aircraft are fitted with TCAS (although there have been occasions when it had been turned off) but it has made flying safer by alerting the crew that perhaps they need to be ready to take manual control or adjust the autopilot. Equivalent systems would need to be available on vehicles, but given how close vehicles get to each other (unless you are traversing deepest Kansas) they would have to be far more complex.
All this automation is, as with any technology, agnostic. It will do what it has been designed to do, provided the flight (or road and traffic for vehicles) conditions are within reasonable limits but there are times it cannot do its intended task. This is what happened on AF447 (the pitot tubes froze and the flight control computers had no way of knowing just what the aircraft speed actually was and therefore no way of being able to control the aircraft - I am not getting into the aftermath of that event).
The problem with any automation is that the human in the cockpit / behind the wheel / driving a train becomes complacent. Although it has its upsides there are significant issues with it. In modern fighter aircraft, it is impossible to manually control the aircraft without flight control automation. The B2, for instance, which has no vertical stabiliser, could not possibly fly without flight control automation. A great deal of training goes into ensuring those operators can cope with sudden loss of automation when the backup system kicks in.
Such training would be necessary for vehicles as well (whether it would actually be implemented is another matter).
Just in case everyone thinks that the pilot must be in control during landing, that is not so; in benign conditions some aircraft are quite capable of landing themselves (I had that experience in the mid 1990s in a B757 arriving at Salt Lake City; smoothest landing I have ever experienced).
All this can, of course, go horribly wrong. The old McDonnell Douglas F-4 radar (really a missile guidance system) had a terrain following mode which followed the terrain to impact in many cases and operators were duly advised not to use it.
That gets us to the crunch of the problem; automation technology is not a replacement for a properly trained operator (I would agree that does not appear to apply to many road users) but augments the operator (or it should).
Trusting technology too much is rather silly, to put it mildly.
A signature line from some years ago is still very apt: "As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
