With human-driven vehicles there is often a chance to make eye contact to confirm that you see each other. Perhaps the robot cars need some equivalent. Interesting interface design problem.
And so Don Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things book fame) is at it from UCSD: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/
If that was really true you would never ride a motorcycle.
Eyeballing the other guy is no guarantee of anything, but it provides quite a lot of information about the risk you face in the interaction. I think we would miss it when dealing with fully autonomous vehicles, and that the vehicles might add something to tell you they see you. I've done some work on this idea in the lab with mobile robots.
This is such a garbage statement. We check our parachutes twice before jumping, and whilst not jumping is inherently safer - having decided to jump you can still protect yourself from risks inherent in the activity.
Since this is not how people really behave, we are very rarely actually assuming the worst.