> From what has been released so far, this feels like a case where a human would have had a high likelihood of doing the same thing and would not have been at-fault in the collision. But self-driving cars have more sensors and, in theory, more capabilities to prevent something like this, and we absolutely should expect them to do better.
The footage was artificially darkened, or it was extremely crappy dash cam or both. I suspect Uber just tampered with it (to get some sympathy) Someone posted a footage from that place few days later and that is very well lit road. On Uber footage you can see lamps on the sky, yet it is very dark.
Also note this dashcam is not what the car uses, and the car is also equipped with LIDAR so it should be able to spot pedestrian even in pitch black.
> As self-driving cars become more prevalent, things like this will happen and it will be tough to walk the line between over-reacting to every incident and killing progress in this area and designing safe cars that don't make the problem worse. I think it is prudent to have Uber stop testing on public roads until they can explain how this happened and how they can keep it from happening again.
Your are missing the point here. Preventing accidents like this should be thing that AI would excel at, even today.
The fact that this failed means that there is something seriously wrong with how Uber is doing it.