Re: Tesla never said it's driverless
"I would counter that the reduced mental agility required to drive a car on autopilot can allow for greater awareness of surroundings and better able to respond to incidents when they happen, as well as stop them happening in the first place."
You're completely correct. It allows drivers much more awareness of surroundings... surroundings like their phones or any of the other toys they have in the car with them.
Even if every single one of the tesla crashes has been caused by the driver not "driving within the requirements of the system" it's still a fault of the system. If the system can and is commonly abused then it's badly designed or implemented. To use your saw analogy, if the safety guard is so badly designed or implemented that you have to take it off to use the saw then the saw is at fault not the operator who removes the guard.
If you want to have automated driving systems that need constant supervision by a driver like those tesla use then they need to be in the background leaving the driving to the driver and only cut in when the driver makes a mistake.
The only reason you'd want to have it the other way round would be if you wanted the driver to be able to play games on a phone rather than supervise the system.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
