Looks like we will transition from completely human driven cars to semi autonomous ones where the role of a human would be to monitor and take over in situations and places where the car can't properly function on its own. We can see the latter happening already, in Tesla cars for example.
I think this is the danger zone of the development process. When it comes to humans monitoring autonomous systems that is the failure point. A human watching the car drive itself and being ready to intervene in the event of an emergency?...I don't think that is going to happen to often...peoples attention span when they are not actively involved in something is very fleeting at best.
I totally agree. By the time a human is able to react, the accident already happens. As you said, our attention span is fleeting at best when we're not actively involved. It will interesting to see how all this evolves.