I'm not concerend about assisted driving. I'm concerned about fully autonomous cars being handed complete control in real-world situations.
I'm not just "concerned" about them- they scare the hell out of me.
>> Many being scenarios that Google's self-driving cars have the technology to avoid.
What Google says it programs its cars to do, what it really programs its cars to do and what its cars can really do are all separate things.
The problem is that the current technology level is nowhere near advanced enough to allow fully autonomous vehicles to operate safely. There is a huge number of situations that those cars aren't programmed for, that they can't be programmed for, because those situations are completely unforseeable.
Machine learning has a huge problem with data sparsness. You may train a learner in petabytes and petabytes of data collected from the real world and still miss the vast majority of events that may occur.
That is why, like I say elsewhere, machine learning-based AI makes utterly ludicrous mistakes that humans would never do, even in difficult situations were they can't be expected to perform with 0% error. I've used a few metaphors- here's another one: a human would never mistake a truck for a cucumber. A machine learning algorithm, might.
And what's worse, there's no way to prevent this sort of mistake, or even correct it, because most of the time the models built by such algorithms are simply too complex to be processed by humans in the way a hand-crafted system would be (and goddess knows how hard those can be to process).
Autopilot in a plane doesn't have to deal with obstacles besides the odd mountain here and there.
So I'd say that in many (most?) ways it's easier and safer to autopilot a plane than a car, and as you say, even planes with autopilot have failed.
Planes most certainly do have to deal with wildlife (e.g. birds) appearing suddenly in their path regularly.
In other words, the plane autopilot doesn't "deal" with wildlife at all unless you count running into it. Which is apparently what Tesla autopilot does as well.
There are already videos of assisted-driving cars avoiding accidents which likely would have been fatal. We already know they can potentially save lives. It's something we already accept for flying. Autopilot in planes has resulted in deaths of crew and passengers. So we have precedent in at least one mode of transportation.
Drivers get T-boned or rear end other people all the time. Those are two scenarios where driver-assist could have applied the brakes and actively saving lives for drivers inattentiveness. You'll also find no shortage of Liveleak clips of people being killed by drivers who failed to see them and brake in time. Many being scenarios that Google's self-driving cars have the technology to avoid.