Humans have the advantage of understanding context enough to (try to) avoid being in those situations though. You may not be able to avoid a car suddenly spinning out right in front of the you, but you may have realized 7 minutes ago the driver kept drifting outside his lane and backed off to give him a bigger gap; getting autonomous cars up to that level would require strong AI tech
Not at all. That level of pattern recognition is much easier than the actual hard problems involved in getting driverless cars working.
The hard problems, right now, are things like recognizing where the road is when it (and everything beside it) is under an inch and a half of snow, or where you're supposed to drive when there's construction and the lanes are shifted (assuming no new standard means are developed to indicate this), or how to recognize, and what to do, when the road you want to take is under a foot of rushing water—or washed out altogether.
This is the thing that continues to baffle me. There are genuine, hard problems between where we are now and a nation of completely autonomous cars. But every time there's a discussion about it, even on a site like Hacker News where people should have the background to recognize the difference, most of the problems people bring up are the kind that self-driving cars either are now or can fairly easily become good at dealing with.
