[jonathanyc]

People are also saying it might be OK if a human wouldn’t have been able to do better. Setting aside whether a human could have done better by at least braking, is “as good as the average human” really a good or reasonable standard?

I thought the whole point was that the average human sucked at driving. If a human driver had LIDAR they would not have crashed into this woman; more precisely, a human driver with LIDAR would have had to have been criminally negligent to have crashed into and then killed this woman.

[bluGill]

This is just one case, we need to know the relative incidence rate before we can state anything. Even if we could somehow prove that a human driver wouldn't have hit the women that still doesn't mean that self driving cars are not massively better than humans: if self driving cars prevented hundreds of deaths they would still be better even though they miss this one situation.

Of course in the end self driving cars need to fix the bug that caused this to happen.

[boardwaalk]

Sure it is, for the moment. We can't require a high bar from the get go. To use an analogy, where would we be if we required the reliability of modern airplane from the advent of the Wright Flyer?

[jonathanyc]

Not really. The equivalent would be criticizing the Wright brothers for (hypothetically) having built and deployed a plane over a city that they knew had a strong risk of crashing and killing someone, when that risk could have been averted by basic engineering available and known to them. We are talking about negligence, not sure why you are trying to change the subject.

No one is saying that self-driving cars need to be perfect. People are asking whether it is responsible to deploy unsafe ones on public roads.