Trusting AI too much can turn out to be fatal

It is a truism of our age that we suffer from a deficit of trust. But in some areas of technology, the opposite is true: there is an alarming surfeit of trust. That was one of the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board's report published last week into the fatal crash of a semi-automated Tesla in California in 2018. The investigators concluded that the Model X sport utility vehicle failed to read the road conditions correctly and accelerated into a crash barrier at 70.8mph while the 38-year-old driver was playing a game on his iPhone. As Robert Sumwalt, NTSB's chairman, said, the crash was not only caused by flaws in Tesla's autopilot.