The key difference being they are reliable 100% of the time.

Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them.

Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.

I agree on lane assist, but I'm confused, how does cruise control fail?

I just set it to a speed on the highway... and the speed stays there until I brake.

Are you talking about adaptive cruise control (ACC) to follow the speed of the car in front?

I also don't use cruise control. Not because I don't trust it, but I don't trust myself to react as quickly with it on. If my "gas foot" rests, it will take longer for it to hit the brake if needed, than if I engage continuously while driving. No scientific proof for this, except my own perception of my own attention.

That's really interesting.

Funny, I don't feel the same -- my foot rests below the brake (on the floor) instead of on the gas pedal so the time to move it to the brake feels roughly the same, and I'm paying 100% attention while driving since I'm still steering and constantly monitoring distance to the cars in front of me. So I don't notice any less attention -- it's just a rest for the muscles in my right foot.

But really I'd definitely go with your own perception here -- if you feel like you're paying less attention then it's a good thing you're not using it! Everyone's attention habits and patterns are different. And I'm glad to know people vary in this.

When I have tried to find a place for my foot when driving cruise control, it has happened that I got the toes of my foot stuck under the brake pedal. It was like I was resting the foot partly below it so when I moved it up, it was in the way. Can differ between cars surely. But in the cars I have driven with cruise control, I have not found a comfortable and at the same time "alert" location to put my foot.

I have the same worry when using cruise control. What I've trained myself to do is to cover the accelerator pedal when overtaking other cars or in any situation where I might have to brake. That way the car is still maintaining speed for me but I'm ready to intervene, to get back the safety margin. With adaptive cruise it may even increase the safety as both me and the cruise control can both brake.

Nitpick: 99.(many 9s)% of the time.

I had the power steering drop out going into a turn (fuel pump failure IIRC), and it could have easily caused an accident (I physically couldn't turn the wheel enough to complete the turn).

If power steering fails in speed, it doesn't really matter - the power steering does very little when the car has some velocity. If you can't turn the wheel at speed, then there's something else than power steering pump failing (the steering must have been locked by something else).

Or you have very serious muscle weakness, at which point I'm not sure if driving a car is a smart option in any case.

I expect the total force required to turn depends also on the vehicle's weight, degree of turn, etc. My manual, 90's Japanese sedan (approximately 3,000 lbs iirc) stalled on me while I was exiting a freeway at ~30mph, along a round, ~270° turn. My first instinct was to try put the car back into gear, but before I could effectively do that, I realized I needed both hands on the wheel just to wrestle the car through the turn. I could have easily caused an accident. The disorientation of losing power steering while turning, and having to move my right hand from shifter to wheel made this a serious situation. If my car were heavier, or the turn were tighter, or if I reacted slower, (all of which are more likely than a very serious muscle weakness), it could have been much worse.

None of them have to deal with fat tail risks. (to quote nissim ntaleb).

I do not know about dbw pedals but power steering and anti-lock breaking operate 100% deterministically and the only true unknown is controlled by the driver.

There's still mechanical failure to deal with.

I am uniquely equipped to answer that question. Did an undergrad in mech E and worked as an automobile engineer for while before pivoting to computer vision and ML.

The safety standard that mechanical parts need to abide by are orders of magnitude higher than any Vision/Software product. Additionally, mechanical failures are rarely catastrophic. The part will most likely alert you hours/days in advance that it has begun to fail. Additionally, when catastrophic failure does happen, it often leads to the car stopping and not ramming through a busy intersection.

The problem with ML algorithms, is that they fail without warning and without intuition. It is incredibly hard to design against catastrophe. ML algos are also great at overfitting, so they can often learn to beat narrow tests while being inept at dealing with the exact scenario the test was supposed to evaluate it for. (I know, I know, "Don't tune on the test set!"... but human factors make it near impossible to avoid some level of it)

We are in dire need of a regulatory/evaluation body for AI that consists of top-tier ML researchers. Now that can be a govt. body or a 3rd party contractor that works closely with the Govt. But, we need to start laying the groundwork and debating around it now. So when we do need it, it is ready to be deployed.

I have a similar background, elec-mech undergrad, masters in robotics doing SLAM, spent time doing electrical design for industrial usage, then software doing computer vision, now working on drone autopilots.

I 100% agree on needing to design and regulate the design of safety critical CV (and particularly ML based CV) algorithms so that, if nothing else, the failure mechanisms are quantifiable and limited in their impact.