I was driving in a heavy rainstorm during the day recently. It was just light enough out that my automatic headlight sensor didn’t turn on. But it’s one of those cases where my headlights are still essential, more to be seen than to help my own visibility. I noticed every third car or so on my drive had the same issue. No headlights.
It’s interesting that something essential to safety, and seemingly simple like a light sensor still isn’t perfect yet. And yet we trust our lives to tech and automation orders of magnitude more complex than our car’s headlights.
Automation is often pitched as this magic solution that will solve all our problems—and it certainly will solve some of them. But it helps to keep a healthy pinch of skepticism, and have human systems ready to intervene when things don’t go to plan.
In other words – know where your manual headlight switch is.