I think there's room for a control system that gives a human a reasonable degree of direct control over the car's movements, while still having it be able to re

I think there's room for a control system that gives a human a reasonable degree of direct control over the car's movements, while still having it be able to refuse potentially unsafe commands. Compare it to a microwave oven. The microwave flux inside the oven is high enough to cause severe burns if you were exposed to it, but the system is designed so that it won't run with the door open -- and it's fail-safe, in the sense that any failure (or combination of failures) is overwhelmingly more likely to result in a safe shutdown than in unsafe exposure. It's still possible to burn yourself on hot food, of course, but my point is that nobody thinks of a microwave as a dangerous piece of equipment that you need to be "qualified" to use, in the way that they think of a car or a table saw.