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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

Cruise control is useful to me because it means I won’t accidentally speed. But having to hold the wheel means I need to pay attention. If the car is driving itself human nature means you might not pay attention. Also if the car does something weird you have to decide in a split second if it is because of a hazard you haven’t seen but the car has, or because the software went wrong.

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You do have to hold the wheel, precisely because you might find yourself having to assess what the car is doing "in a split second", and possibly issue corrective actions. You can't do that unless you are holding the wheel and are paying attention to what the car is doing! But all that means is that the car is not really driving itself; it is however dealing with the boring, predictable parts of the job and leaving the rest up to you - this makes it easier to be attentive, not harder. The tasks where it's hard to pay continued attention are ones where you have to do something that seems extremely predictable, but also has very rare events where it isn't. Computer assistance can actually help a lot with such cases.

That makes no sense. If I can’t pay attention to the boring predictable part of driving how am I going to pay attention when I’m not even the one driving?

As for the rare unpredictable stuff, I might not be able to predict, say, a ladder falling off a work truck, but I can recognize it could fall off, prepare for that type of event, probably even recognize it before the car does, and if I don’t die, I can learn from it.

I don’t really see how also having to worry about the car itself creating a rare event helps. Now I’ve got to spend additional time deciding whether to take over and if I do, the time I have to react is reduced.

The boring predictable parts of driving (lane keeping and speed keeping) are already basically unconscious muscle memory. It’s watching others for surprises that takes the mental energy.

Exactly - though speed keeping is nice for long road-trips simply not to get foot cramps.

Anyway, I'm yet to see a video of Tesla doing emergency breaks because of highway pileup where it's not only a couple of seconds after human driver could see a row of red breaking lights in front.

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