Your first point is good. I should have stated that "Hypothetical Best Possible Human Driver" has been established. We can do a lot to improve safety in the average driver. But human reaction times, spacial awareness have hard limits. You can only react so fast, and you can only look at what your two eyes can show you at once. Once the average driver starts to approach the best possible human driver, improvements will be very hard to come by.
But your second point, if humans are dumb, their tech will be dumb is demonstrably false. Groups of idiots can collaborate to make 1 fantastic solution to a problem. Or a solution that improves over time. Software also tends to have fairly stable performance, except for specific outages. Where a human may have the capability to be a safe driver, but performance varies drastically based on mood, age, distraction.
I could definitely be wrong. But I would be comfortable betting every penny I have that automated driving will be safer even the best human drivers in 20 years. No one can know the future, but betting on human power instead of technology has been a losing strategy since the printing press was invented.
Humans can be pretty good if they're trained like jet fighter pilots. I'm sure automated cars will outperform them (or at least be as good as them) if they're built and maintained like jet fighters. If we can't make average human a jet fighter pilot, can we make them maintain their cars at that level? And expect to pay for them accordingly.
On the second point, I'm more talking about hacking scene and maintenance. I'm pretty sure today's jackasses will find a way to hack auto-piloted cars to act like jackasses. And drunktards will drive unmaintained cars with not working and counterfeit sensors too.
But your second point, if humans are dumb, their tech will be dumb is demonstrably false. Groups of idiots can collaborate to make 1 fantastic solution to a problem. Or a solution that improves over time. Software also tends to have fairly stable performance, except for specific outages. Where a human may have the capability to be a safe driver, but performance varies drastically based on mood, age, distraction.
I could definitely be wrong. But I would be comfortable betting every penny I have that automated driving will be safer even the best human drivers in 20 years. No one can know the future, but betting on human power instead of technology has been a losing strategy since the printing press was invented.