The sensors observed the pedestrian 6 seconds before impact! That's more than enough time to come to a complete stop.
That's enough time to play a bell that alerts the driver and for the driver to manually react, press the brakes, and come to a complete stop.
And this was a pretty easily preventable scenario (which just makes it more tragic of course). Software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads.
UBER software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads. There are multiple competitors in this space (Waymo and Argo immediately come to mind); they don't generally have Uber's reputation of "move fast and break things" or of "cut human costs as soon as feasible."
In my initial assessment, I was reasoning the other direction---from practices I was familiar with from stories of those companies to Uber---and falsely assumed Uber was behaving more responsibly than they were. This Uber tragedy doesn't significanly update my prior assumptions about its competitors.
I agree this incident doesn't give evidence about Uber's comepetitors, but I just don't believe software is anywhere near ready to safely navigate neighborhood driving. Many of the challenges involve assessing the knowledge, goals, and capabilities of other people and objects in the environment which is far ahead of anything AI can do except in specialized scenarios with lots of accurate training data. Many of the scenarios wil be unique and not encountered in prior training data. So I'm very skeptical.
The car should have slowed at that six second mark, and at least reduced speed dramatically by the time of impact (if not completely).
The risk of fatality would have been severely reduced if the car was (at most) travelling at 30mph (likely around ~10% - instead of between 25% and 60% for the speed at the time of impact depending on what study you choose).
That's enough time to play a bell that alerts the driver and for the driver to manually react, press the brakes, and come to a complete stop.
And this was a pretty easily preventable scenario (which just makes it more tragic of course). Software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads.