There are contrary examples that normal people would know too. For instance, it’s common to use the phrase “on autopilot” to describe the state of a person who does something really stupid because they were following a routine without thinking.
People keep saying that but I don’t buy it. For example, “to do something on autopilot” is a common idiom meaning that you did something reflexively without thinking, often with bad results.
That's referring to the human condition of "being on autopilot" (aka. your higher cognitive functions aren't doing much and you're brain's operating primarily on reflex). It's generally only used to describe situations where you've done something dumb because you were impaired or weren't really paying attention.
For a real-life example, just look up "Tesla autopilot almost crash" on YouTube. There are plenty of people who let Autopilot drive when they really shouldn't.
Are you being intentionally caustic? The phrase "running on autopilot" is an established colloquialism for doing something without being mindful of it, and almost every major dictionary definition of "autopilot" states that it is a system used to navigate something without a human.
Demanding a rigorous scientific study on human understanding of a word is simply not necessary when there are multiple recorded videos of people asleep at the wheel with a fucking banana on a string dangling from the steering wheel to fool the system.
I think the argument against the term 'autopilot' is less about the technical accuracy, and more about the implication and assumptions of the layman. To most people, 'autopilot' suggest that they can be totally hands-off, which isn't true yet.
The moment you use Autopilot it's evident that it's basically a fancy cruise control. You're assuming some people would not interfere with Autopilot in any scenario. To think somehow people with that much lack of common sense exist is odd. It shows a massive level of disregard for those people's ability to perform basic functions.
And yet when we get stuck in thought and don’t think about where we’re going and drive to our office on the weekend by accident we say “oh, I got stuck in autopilot”
These accidents are not people mistaking the purpose of autopilot, they are people slipping into false confidence that the car will handle the driving for them because it has in the past.
A good example might be driving on "autopilot" (not the Tesla kind, the human kind), meaning driving your usual commute and all of the sudden realizing that you can't really recall the last minutes, you were just going "through the motions". Now, driving is a complex task, with planning and action and such, yet it can happen entirely delegated to the subconscious.
I am asserting people have a set idea of what the word "autopilot" means, and it doesn't mean "unable to pilot on its own without me being fully attentive to it at all times". And I am also asserting that this name was chosen specifically for this implication.
Let me try to explain, people are not knowledgeable on how airplane autopilot works, what people understand when they hear autopilot is from what they had seen in movies or games, read in books or what the words actual mean.
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