People put themselves in dangerous situations all the time. I don't believe for one second that you've never made a traffic mistake in your life, either as a pedestrian or as a driver. But you've been fortunate to be surrounded by others who'll pick up the slack for your mistake and will yield even if they don't have to if it will prevent an accident. The traffic rules don't matter nearly as much as the outcome of people not being killed. Traffic rules are just a means to an end.

So yes, it's quite possible for autonomous vehicles to cause vastly more deaths than human drivers even while being slaves to the rules. Hell, you could do it too as a human driver if you removed your conscience. Just don't hit the brakes the next time you have the right of way and a jaywalker steps out in front of you. You'll easily kill someone within a week and have it be their "fault".

You're onto an important theme: so much of driving is really about group communication--everything from signaling to anticipating behavior based on your own past actions, to waving people through intersections or slowing down to let someone merge or speeding up to make your intent more clear, or hanging back when the traffic gets stupid, or avoiding drivers who seem irrational.

That's why I think the real self-driving car problem is a very special case of the Turing Test--one that might be more difficult to win or solve.

Most higher end cars already have assistant systems that prevent you from running over people or into unexpected obstacles. The problem here seems to be that Uber disabled some of those systems that the Volvo base car normally has.

I’ve read about the incident but haven’t seen mention of why they did this. Was their own system supposed to provide the same safety or something?

Apparently every self driving company does that. So e.g. Waymo also disables such safety systems.

> I believe the pedestrian caused this situation by putting themselves in a dangerous situation and not paying attention

That's the thing - every driver has faced those situations, hundreds, thousands of times. Odds are very good a failure one of those times would have significant penalty for any driver, even if it wasn't their fault.

Others are making good points but also, if the system can't be trusted to detect a pedestrian in these circumstances we can't be sure this bug wouldn't allow it to hit a stalled car or large piece of debris in the road either. Even if the car had just hit the bicycle and missed the woman this would be an utterly unacceptable level of performance for an AV to display after completing closed track testing.

> It's an unpopular opinion, but I believe the pedestrian caused this situation by putting themselves in a dangerous situation and not paying attention.

That doesn't mean that the Uber system wasn't dangerously defective and that a fit foservice self-driving system would have noticed in time to react (which may not have been sufficient to avert a collision, and may not have prevented a fatality, but given the speeds involved would have significantly reduced the risk of fatality.

That the pedestrian should not have entered the roadway where and when they did may relieve Uber of legal liability for this collision, it doesn't stop the failure to react at all from being evidence of a critical safety flaw.

And, had the same thing happened at an equally poorly lit, not specially marked, intersection in many jurisdictions (including California, not sure about Arizona), Uber would be legally at fault because of pedestrian right of way. If Uber's system can't see and react to people in dark clothes at night, it's not even remotely suitable for use, at least at night.

> It's an unpopular opinion, but I believe the pedestrian caused this situation by putting themselves in a dangerous situation

Interesting! What reasons do you have to think this is an unpopular opinion? To me, it sounds like an obvious conclusion.