> I can assure you that a human who is driving carelessly would be held criminal liable.
Do you see evidence that the car was "driving carelessly"? That's an honest question - from the reporting so far, it doesn't seem clear what the underlying cause was.
Secondly, this is demonstrably false: most pedestrian fatalities by vehicles do not result in criminal charges. If you don't believe me, look up the stats. Or talk to the countless bikers' advocacy groups that have been lodging this exact complaint for decades: drivers are not generally held criminally responsible, unless there are mitigating circumstances (the driver is drunk, the accident was a hit-and-run, etc.).
> Why do you assume an accident that was severe enough to have resulted in a persons death—the car didn’t just scrape them because they ran across the street—is not due to a reckless programming?
When a pedestrian dies, just because they died, that doesn't mean the driver is automatically responsible. It could have been the pedestrian's fault, or it could have been the driver's fault. Or it could be both. Or it could even be neither (a true accident, with no assignment of blame).
The same thing holds here. You can't assume that this is the result of "reckless programming", and to be entirely blunt, by jumping to that conclusion on the basis of literally no evidence whatsoever (and misinterpreting existing case law on vehicular accidents in the process), you're actually undermining the success of any future efforts to prevent these sorts of accidents in the future, whether or not it ultimately turns out to be the fault of someone at Uber.