And know that I will be grilling you on every one. ;-)

Please do! Because I totally didn't realize it was that Henry Petroski, I took the article at face value. I thought he wasn't a very good author, but it seems now almost certain that he had an inadequate editor. That doesn't diminish the terribleness of the article much, though - it mostly shifts the blame onto WSJ.

What prompted me to write this in this specific format was to contrast the good and bad parts of the article. It's the Hubski version of a running commentary. So if anyone wants to roll with that idea, be my guest.

And your blind spot on this, I think, is that you see Petroski asking questions as if they're unanswered... rather than seeing it as Petroski asking questions that will be answered multiple ways.

I agree with you that the problems surrounding this topic have many aspects and multiple ways of advancing. The way I see it is that there is One Big Question that AV's attempt to answer: how do we convert human driving intelligence into machine driving intelligence? Every example or situation (or even trolley problem) is an extension of that question, and all the manifestations of automated technology are potential answers to it.

My main point of criticism is that this article never makes that clear, because if that were clear, it means that you need to specify what part of the question and what sort of answer you're talking about. A Google car (answer) in a double-parked situation (question) is in an entirely different league than driving on the highway (question) in an Audi with ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems, an answer). This is why I hammered on the assumptions being made and the situations being discussed in the article, and how the article does a terrible job of it.

That there's no easy thing to point to for parallel argument demonstrates that this is something nobody's thinking about much. And that's the gist of the article - "nobody is thinking about this much".

I agree, but a more fair assesment would be that the attention on this topic is disproportionally small. The 1600-page tome has 38 pages on implications for the future, and I know a few articles that are thinking about this so I'm not a lone wolf here. It also needs to be noted that this research question is built upon the assumption that automated technology will move quite far beyond fancy cruise controls. (Just putting that on record here.)

Maybe it's my Dutch urban planning background, but I think that people have forgotten the tremendous impact on cities and transportation of postwar mass car adoption. In the case of American cities, most of which are built around cars, I still think this can be an interesting and major shift.

instead of recognizing that the probable eventuality is a massive publicly-funded FAA-grade "ground traffic control system"

Interesting way of putting it. How do you see this playing out?