"Tesla's Autopilot Predicts a Crash Freakishly Early"

I can think of a lot of ways Skynet could use this tech.

I have a friend with a Tesla. I hadn't even realized that it's now legal to turn over control to the computer - he sits behind the wheel and reads his Kindle while his car drives him to work!

I'm not sure if I'd trust it that much yet, but that's just natural psychological aversion. In reality, self-driving cars now are probably less likely to have an accident than the average human driver. Taxi and truck drivers really need to look at the writing on the wall.

So if I have a self-driving car, all I need is a way to turn complete control of it over to Uber during the hours I'm not using it, right? Then it's making money for me twenty hours a day...

I saw what you saw, but a lot of drivers would have missed it. When we were RVing full-time, we'd see a near-miss that could have ended like that about every 1000 miles, and one that could have involved us about every 4000. 

There's also the near-miss vs. actual issue here. I saw a potential accident, right up until it became one. The Tesla, OTOH, was able to calculate the closing rate between those two vehicles much faster and more accurately than you or I, and therefore accurately predict a collision rather than a possible near-miss. That's a huge difference in my mind. I would have had my foot off the gas and over the brake, but I bet I wouldn't have stopped as fast as the Tesla did.

It's hard work, driving at the level of concentration that keeps those near-misses from being expensive. Five hours of that is about all I can do in a day and still stay sane.

If I can trade in or retrofit my Class C to take that load off my mind, I'll do it in a heartbeat. It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than a 65-year-old man with so-so eyesight and reflexes way slower than in my youth.

Well, that will depend entirely on the regulatory regime. The most confounding of all the issues surrounding the ability of the proletariat to seize the means of production is why the supposedly-progressive left is so dead-set against this realization of one of Marx's fondest dreams.

How many jobs that appear in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook were simply unimaginable 50 or even 20 years ago?

Economics is the study of how humans satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources. The most limited resource of all is one's time. Wasting the wealth of human time on chores that are more efficiently executed by machines makes as much sense when speaking of transportation as when one speaks of digging ditches. Personally, I think getting rid of steam shovels would be a bad idea.

My Dad spent 41 years in a hot, dangerous factory. He didn't have the first clue of how I would make a living, but his fondest wish was that I make it in more comfort, and more productively, than he did, by applying more brain power and less muscle.

He'd understand literally nothing about the field in which I made my living, but he would be greatly pleased, nonetheless.

The widespread concern over autonomous cars is part of a weird desire to bring back an era of monotonous, dirty, dangerous, noisy jobs that people almost universally hated, primarily out of fear of tomorrow. That makes absolutely no sense to me.

My husband got a Tesla 2 months or so ago, and my understanding is you're supposed to pay VERY close attention to driving plus have your hands on the wheel at all times while the autopilot is on.  The car actually reminds you, if you take your hands off the wheel.  I suppose your friend can rest his hands on the wheel while he holds his Kindle and "trick" the car.  I don't think that's very smart, though.  There are some things our car can't do yet, like note stop signs.  Also, it frequently gets scarily close to cars parked by the side of the road and to the median divider on the freeway.  It doesn't seem ready to just let the autopilot go, at this point.  Even though it does improve with each software update (he's had a few updates since he bought the car, and each one is noticeable). But I wouldn't trust it yet at all to drive by itself.