You left out the part that if there is a collision or loss of life the captain goes to prison.

Same with cars

Drivers get so much leeway that it's not even funny. Commercial air pilots get their licenses temporarily suspended if they're simply accused of being intoxicated.

Short of being drunk, it's pretty difficult to go to prison for killing someone in a car, even if you were driving like a moron.

Not my experience. I knew a kid who went to prison for years after hitting a biker in black with no reflector at night.

Was the biker the police chief's son-in-law, or some rot like that?

Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time[1]. But sure, I can believe that hitting and killing the wrong person sometimes results in the law coming down on you like a ton of bricks.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...

I read the whole article twice but didn't see anything saying that "Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time“.

It basically says that statistics on conviction are unknown, and sometimes people don't see jail time.

Autopilot in planes is not remotely as you described. It is used to reduce cognitive load precisely so pilots can pay more attention to higher cognitive demand tasks than maintaining straight and level flight. Such as collision avoidance, radio communication, navigation, briefing, etc.

Your point only alleges that amateur yacht drivers act irresponsibly, not that naval autopilot systems are inherently unsafe.

Garmin released a product that does the radio comms, navigation, and landing in an emergency. https://discover.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

If by "radio comms", you mean playing a pre-recorded emergency message on a loop telling everyone to get out of the way.

It can't visually identify non-ADS-B traffic (and I'm not even sure yet if it will avoid ADS-B equipped traffic?), it can't comply with ATC clearances, it can't coordinate with other pilots in the pattern, and it will happily fly your aircraft right into potentially-fatal icing conditions. It certainly can't be used during routine flight.

Garmin Autoland is a wonderful piece of engineering, but even at best it's not a replacement for what a pilot would normally be doing to safely navigate. It's strictly there as a last-resort measure if the pilot is incapacitated.

… and it will happily fly you into a construction crane that was notam’d a couple weeks back ;)

You're 100% correct, but my point is still valid: "autopilot" on a yacht and what tells calls "autopilot" are totally unrelated.

Luckily the seas are very big, so there's much less of a chance of a collision. Not zero though.

The extra dimensionality of roads < seas < skies help a lot. Though I suppose various standard corridors and channels collapse those dimensions somewhat.