> You are willing to take the risk, but society as a whole will not.
What are you talking about? People very objectively ride planes that are not completely safe. Airlines that are nowhere near completely safe still get tons of customers.
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".
> You are willing to take the risk, but society as a whole will not.
What are you talking about? People very objectively ride planes that are not completely safe. Airlines that are nowhere near completely safe still get tons of customers.