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I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.

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That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates.

I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoided previously because something inscrutable in the programming changed.

Perhaps we're heading towards a world with on average better, but less well-understood, outcomes.

I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake.

We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.

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