JAL plane aborts landing after car spotted on runway at Tokushima airport

Close is kind of an understatement bub. That could have got real ugly PDQ, looking at your link.

Yeah they said it was a Sunday and there was only 1 guy on duty, normally 4.

It's hard to tell without having the specs of this proposed automated system to look over, but at a guess, you'd have to equip all of the ramp vehicles with transponders/ASDE-X as part of the system. Then the computer would have seen "runway occupied" and initiated a go-around. It likely would have done so well before any human could have seen the conflict.

I get your point that humans can be more flexible when dealing with unexpected and unpredictable situations -- say, a boulder dropped in the middle of the touchdown zone -- and I also don't want to see human pilots replaced, but I don't think that means that humans will always do better, either on average or with known failure modes.

Tarmac is a material similar to asphalt ... and, no, they'll never learn. To most of the public, what we call a "ramp" or "apron" is the tarmac.

Out of all the things they could get wrong, though, that one doesn't bother me much. Sure, it's a misunderstanding, but it has no serious implications.

There are others that are potentially much more serious, such as not understanding the roles and responsibilities that the each of us has, or how the safety record is achieved. Those are the sorts of things that lead to hysteria, bad press, and usually even worse legislation. The Colgan disaster is a good case in point.

A compliment for a non American pilot, blimey, we should get it framed!!