[acrefoot]

I learned recently this is sometimes visualized by something called the "Swiss Cheese Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Regarding self driving cars: I was once told that a big reason for the safety of fly-by-wire systems (when planes first moved from directly attached controls) is that the engineers who built those systems had to take the first flights, so they made sure their systems were good. That is probably the case for self-driving cars too, but falling out of the sky feels more viscerally unsafe than driving on a highway, and the gradual nature of the changeover probably isn't helping either.