"This is the "dirty little secret" that the technology proponents don't want to talk about."
There aren't any secrets about this. Occasionally even the best technology will fail, as you say. But airlines are a bad example in my view. Highly trained, highly paid pilots plus extraordinary technology have made major airline disasters vanishingly rare. We would be idiots to mess with that, except by adding additional technology and still having at least two pilots on any commercial flight. It's working. End of story.
However, the current technology wedding cars and drivers is failing utterly and completely. 30,000 deaths per year, 100s of billions of dollars in medical expenses and property damage, not to mention incalculable suffering, demonstrate that the current model is an abysmal failure. Unless we can employ highly trained and disciplined drivers and high technology, as we have now on the airlines, nothing will change. We are not going to make 100 million+ drivers competent to drive, attentive to the road, never drinking alcohol or doing drugs. The only solution to these millions of preventable deaths over a lifetime is better technology, not better drivers. It's one thing to have a few thousand great pilots paid $100-300,000 dollars per year. We're not going to be able to do that for 200 million automobiles, are we? 
