Giving control to the human only when there is a problem is a horrible thing to do! The only ones that are helped in such a situation are the software writers who can then claim that the accident was due to human error because, at the time of the crash, the software wasn’t in control. (As an aside, this is exactly what is happening in air travel. Pilots who are out of practice are suddenly called upon to handle the worst situations and then blamed when the worst happens.)

Imagine you are cruising along reading a book, when an alarm goes off and you are suddenly expected to grab a steering wheel that you haven’t touched in months and engage in an emergency situation that you didn’t see develop, and you are expected to do the right thing. That’s a bad idea in anybody’s book, yet that is exactly where we are heading.

What we need are systems that can take over when there is an emergency, not systems that handle the routine stuff we can already do ourselves. Systems that automatically engage when the driver is being reckless or careless is what is needed.