[Cybiote]

Telling people to remain alert will do no good because it is simply asking for too much. A person is supposed to sit still, not driving but maintaining their full attention while being ready to automatically take over in an emergency situation. This will lead to the same failure of vigilance over time we see in guard duty and it really can't be helped. Task unrelated thoughts crop up more frequently for simpler tasks; with few stimuli, low surprises and little to attend to, the brain will begin with experience replay (this is actually more a machine learning term but it's appropriate here).

Driving already leads to mind wandering states; it is overwhelmingly likely that the passive aspect of autopilot will lead to mind wandering at even higher rates. Asking a less practiced driver to shift attention from internal to external states very quickly and then make complex judgments is simply not fair. A simple physics and statistics based model will be far more reliable. If it isn't, then Google's strategy of shooting straight to level 4 makes sense.

> The public's perception and 'common sense' understanding of technology is sadly very limited

Common sense is contextual and one of the more complicated aspects of cognition; it depends on the level of detail in the model being used to make inferences. A model's sophistication is dictated by internal preferences and goals. If most people's understanding of a technology is limited, then they're going to be doing what looks like averaging over distinct possibilities to a more informed model.

It doesn't help that if you know nothing about technical uses of the term autopilot but do know something about words (which will be the case for most) then in truth, it is the aviation industry that has misnomered.