[Patrick_Devine]

The recent crash at SFO was caused by mistakenly thinking the airplane was working a different way than it was actually working. The pilots thought the autothrottles were engaged when they weren't and were fixated on trying to land the plane manually; something they hadn't done in a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214

[ghaff]

Which is the sort of problem we'll likely see more of as "mostly autonomous" systems become increasingly common. For example, it's easy to imagine that it will become possible (whether or not we elect to go down that route) to design cars that can be self-driving most of the time but which will require a human to take over in some scenarios. The good news is that those scenarios will presumably be mostly low speed ones--the handoff timeframe pretty much has to be of minute rather than second magnitude--but you could still end up with an increasing number of drivers who have very little actual driving experience.