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That's assuming he would have fallen asleep without autopilot.

Happens all the time, those split second sleeps that destroy peoples lives.

He certainly could have, but he also might not have. If he was actively driving he may have remained more alert, or he may have chosen to pull over. It's a counterfactual so we don't really know for sure either way.

Yeah, sure. I guess you can say that a driver who hadn't slept the night before and was super stressed out about work could've fallen asleep while driving on a monotonous and boring highway, but he also might not have. Yet, at the end of the day, it's far more likely that he would've fallen asleep either way.

I feel like this distracts from the fact that the self-driving feature was probably safer than falling asleep at a manual car for everyone involved.

In general, I think people are more likely to fall asleep when supervising an autonomous machine than when operating a manual machine. However falling asleep when operating any machine is obviously possible and it may that this driver was so tired that he would have slept in either scenario. We don't know.

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