Notably, an aircraft autopilot will NOT avoid hitting anything in its path, or slow down for it, or react to it in any way. It's just that the sky is very big and other aircraft are very small, so random collisions are extremely unlikely.
> an aircraft autopilot will NOT avoid hitting anything in its path, or slow down for it, or react to it in any way
TAWS (terrain) and ACAS (traffic) are built into modern autopilots.
And Tesla lied about its autopilot’s capabilities in proximity to this crash:
“In 2016, the company posted a video of what appears to be a car equipped with Autopilot driving on its own.
‘The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons,’ reads a caption that flashes at the beginning of the video. ‘He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’ (Six years later, a senior Tesla engineer conceded as part of a separate lawsuit that the video was staged and did not represent the true capabilities of the car.”
> A navigation mechanism, as on an aircraft, that automatically maintains a preset course.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=automatic+pilot
Note that “autopilot” and “automatic pilot” are synonyms.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=Autopilot
An autopilot is supposed to be an automatic system, which doesn’t imply supervision.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=automatic
> Self-regulating: an automatic washing machine.