That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.

Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.

It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created.

You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference.

Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot.

[1]: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/