One problem that is often ignored in these debates is that people already don't always pay attention while driving. Spend some time looking at other drivers next time you are a passenger in slow traffic. The number of drivers on their phones, eating, doing makeup, shaving, or even reading a book is scary.
It therefore isn't a clean swap of a human paying attention to a human who isn't. It becomes a complicated equation that we can't just dismiss with "people won't pay attention". It is possible that a 90%/10% split of drivers paying attention to not paying attention is more dangerous when they are all driving manually than a 70%/30% split if those drivers are all using self-driving tech to cover for them. Wouldn't you feel safer if the driver behind you who is answering texts was using this incremental self-driving tech rather than driving manually?
No one has enough data on the performance of these systems or how the population of drivers use them to say definitively that they are either safer or more dangerous on the whole. But it is definitely something that needs to be investigated and researched.
It therefore isn't a clean swap of a human paying attention to a human who isn't. It becomes a complicated equation that we can't just dismiss with "people won't pay attention". It is possible that a 90%/10% split of drivers paying attention to not paying attention is more dangerous when they are all driving manually than a 70%/30% split if those drivers are all using self-driving tech to cover for them. Wouldn't you feel safer if the driver behind you who is answering texts was using this incremental self-driving tech rather than driving manually?
No one has enough data on the performance of these systems or how the population of drivers use them to say definitively that they are either safer or more dangerous on the whole. But it is definitely something that needs to be investigated and researched.