Oh, I thought you were accepting the characterization of planes as the gold standard. Because planes have the same scary part, of giving up control.

But more importantly a couple paranoid regulators don't really represent "society as a whole", so you're not drawing on particularly relevant experience here when you talk about something as locked-down as rail or planes. With the constant looming death toll of human car crashes and state by state regulation there's a lot of room for getting these systems on the road.

Aerospace is the /absolute/ leader for driver assistance. They have decades of experience, especially in the field of ergonomics and brilliantly crafted semi-automated procedures[1].

But in the end, we all accept the risk of riding planes that we don't control because we entrust our lives to /trained pilots/ not because of such systems. As an illustration, the debate is still vigorous about whether or not a computer should be allowed to sit betwen the driver and the actuators [2]. It is also the case for cars, especially after the Toyota blunders [3] so I do believe all this body of experience is relevant and cannot be easily "disrupted".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy... [2] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/149/what-are-th... [3] http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...