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Humans being bad at vigilance tasks isn't a hypothesis, it has been thoroughly studied for aviation safety reasons and is one of the hundreds of social and behavioral changes that aviation made to better interact with the human machine.

Hundreds of people have died explicitly because well trained people with thousands of hours of experience got distracted from their vigilance task. This isn't a hypothetical. There are bodies in the florida everglades.

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That isn't what I'm saying.

I'm saying it was a reasonable hypothesis that "you're going to have a bad time" with a system like Autopilot, because of the vigilance concern you're referencing. But there is clearly more at play than vigilance, because it's not shaking out that way -- Autopilot (and similar lanekeeping + adaptive cruise systems from other manufacturers) aren't killing people left and right.

So, I was sharing my own hypothesis for why that may be: that the benefits of reduced fatigue are outweighing the drawbacks of distraction and complacency.

As mentioned by another poster, there is actual research[0] showing that, once controlling for additional factors, Autopilot actually increases crashes by 11%. This is utilising Tesla-provided data, too, which could mean the data itself is already biased.

0. https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973

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