One is a failure to act as an agent - to control the car and make decisions. Another is a failure to even be a reliable tool - to do what the operator commands. Very different.
Coming up with new words and terms in order to escape the comparison smacks of This Time It’s Different. Therac-25 was an Agent for performing radiation therapy - it controlled the radiation machine and made decisions. Autopilot/FSD is supposed to be a tool for the driver and it fails to be a reliable tool by driving into things.
Agent - Something that makes decisions and actions that are not pre-programmed or predictable. Humans are definitely agents. LLM (eg Chat-GPT) are not quite there yet (they don't take action on their own).
Tool - Pretty much everything humanity has made to date. It does a preprogrammed thing or provides mechanical advantage. But it does not act on novel decisions it is making.
The terms come from an AI safety expert that Lex Friedman interviewed recently. [1]
Tesla FSD is almost an agent, though it asks a human to be ready to take over at any time.
