If there was an autopilot that nailed every scenario in any weather condition except clearly overturned trucks in good weather, should that system be approved for general public use?
Considering the fact that accidents often attract bystanders and emergency personnel to help the incapacitated driver, the inability to avoid an existing wreck in clear weather is a glaring hazard to human life.
Moreover, trucks sometimes contain hazardous or flammable materials.
So the answer to your question is a resounding no, in my view.
You can bring in new safety features without having full self-driving. I think the safest option is to have human drivers, with the car always monitoring to avoid any serious accidents. People will still be attentive, since they are in full control, but you avoid just as many accidents as you would if the car was driving itself.
I agree. By establishing an "auto-pilot," you actually eliminate redundancy by putting the driver in a passive position. (No matter how many times you tell the driver to remain attentive)
The machine ought to be an error handler for specific failures of an active human driver (sudden braking of lead vehicle, lane straying, etc). This is the only way to get both machine and human to pay full attention. A person in a co-pilot role will struggle to react quickly enough to handle errors of the machine auto-pilot.
So, yeah, you're right - there aren't any alternative systems that manage to avoid this problem. Even humans suck at it. And if even humans can't handle construction areas safely, how can you possibly expect computers to be perfect?
There are. Use two or three alternative AI implementations, which will watch each other. Kind of famous "Predator" algo, but for driving. If one will fail, second will pick up. If one makes mistakes, second will teach it.
Nope, it shouldn't. A system that happily plows into a massive static object that blocks 3 lanes of traffic just because the system didn't recognize it as a danger should never be allowed on the road. In fact Tesla should remotely disable autopilot on every single car out there until this is investigated, tested and patched. And even then I have my reservations about the naming, it's not an autopilot.
Why not? In that hypothetical, ramming every overturned truck while avoiding all other accidents would be a massive improvement in safety. What about the truck scenario makes it so bad as to outweigh avoiding the other accidents?
Moreover, trucks sometimes contain hazardous or flammable materials.
So the answer to your question is a resounding no, in my view.