&gt;&gt; <i>I think the main problem with aircraft is lack of redundancy. They still count on the ability of letting the pilots control the aircraft (e.g. .1% of the time as you mentioned), I think they should just try to go all the way as much as possible.</i><p>I&#x27;m not an airliner pilot, but I have the impression almost everyone is always grossly underestimating how often a human pilot is still required to safely fly a commercial airliner. Yes, the autopilot may be able to handle 99% of the flights without intervention, or even 99.9% of the flights, but simple math shows that that means there are still tens if not hundreds of thousands of flights <i>every day</i> where the pilot needs to take action, and that any individual pilot will get into a situation where the autopilot will fail to handle a situation probably once or twice a year. Likely a lot more often.<p>Large parts of the world have weather conditions, diversions, or airports with spotty or unreliable ground systems by the way, in those areas the need for a human pilot will be several times higher than once every hundred flights. There&#x27;s ample examples of plane crashes that were caused by automated systems, rather than pilot error (I don&#x27;t remember the exact location and date, but I know that e.g. not very long ago a plane crashed because the ILS beacon at the airport was malfunctioning). In other cases the level of automation enabled lousy pilots with bad training to fly the airplane (case in point: the Air Asiana crash at SFO), which IMO is not &#x27;pilot error&#x27; because these people should not have been flying the plane in the first place.<p>All this makes me think the solution to improve airliner safety even further is not more automation, but better pilot training.<p>As for autonomous driving, besides AI assisted highway cruising, I don&#x27;t believe in the concept at all, and my bet is that in 25 years we&#x27;ve realized that we&#x27;ve been wasting most of the time trying to build fully autonomous vehicles. Limiting the possibilities of driver error seems like a much better investment (e.g. automatic cruise control, automatic emergency braking, etc).