Turns out, at least in my own personal experience, that’s not how it works. I don’t think this has been well studied, especially in the context of driving in a

Turns out, at least in my own personal experience, that’s not how it works. I don’t think this has been well studied, especially in the context of driving in a vehicle with gaze / attention tracking features. While my Tesla is working to keep the car perfectly centered in the highway lane, it frees me to focus on higher-level situational awareness during the drive. In particular, I find I can more quickly and consistently identify and avoid other distracted drivers, because I can look more closely at those features without drifting a few inches out of the middle of the lane. Just because you are not steering does not mean you have to disengage from driving. The focus on steering as a proxy for engagement is over-simplistic. Manual steering just to lane center can lead to “blind stare” which causes many accidents, so it’s a lossy proxy for attention / focus. As a new technology is adopted and people become less scared of the change, it eventually comes to a point where a new generation laughs at how things used to be done. What HN consistently likes to frame as a fundamental human limitation (“driving without actively steering can never be safe”) is in fact just a faulty assumption and purely conjecture in the context of a modern car cockpit with advanced lane keeping, adaptive cruise, object detection, and driver gaze & blink tracking.