Originally Posted by
tdracer
BTW, late last year, there was a passenger trail derailment between Seattle and Portland when the engineer took a 35 mph curve at nearly 80 mph. Several people died. They were planning to install an automatic train speed control (that would have automatically slowed the train and prevented the derailment) - but hadn't gotten around to it yet. The public outcry was such that they had to promise to implement the automatic speed control before restarting the route...
There is a vast vast difference between an automatic speed limiter over a short section of track and a fully autonomous train. In the case of a train, literally only one variable would be autonomously controlled, speed, and no one yet trusts a computer to do that completely autonomously, even just for freight. It will take much much more before anyone trusts a computer to autonomously control a passenger aircraft where literally dozens of variables would need to be controlled simultaneously. And not just controlled, but coordinated.