Someone in this discussion has an insane amount of blind faith in technology which here literally killed a pedestrian, and it’s not the people who are arguing for just consequences.
Aren't you the same person who called for holding the developer liable for writing software with a bug? Are you accusing the developer of promising something that is impossible (not hitting a pedestrian in a crosswalk?) or simply implementing it wrong?
It's worth pointing out that we have no idea yet who is at fault in this accident. It could easily be someone who simply walked out in front of traffic when they weren't paying attention.
The above poster seems pretty clear that it is NOT obvious that cars will necessarily drive safer than humans on average, in the same way it is NOT obvious that we will ever have General Artificial Intelligence.
These are very complicated problems, and the machines are currently (significantly) worse than human drivers, so I think it's fair to question the argument that "everything will work out eventually"
I think that is why the very assertive "Are you saying..." is appropriate.
But humans always overestimate the rate of progress, and think we will be living in some amazing futurescape in the next 10 years.
Theoretically it could be otherwise, perhaps, though the human brain has an extremely parallel pattern-matching engine honed by about half a billion years of evolution.
Realistically, the self-driving system will be made of layered distinct components that all add latency. This is how we build both hardware and software. An image is sensed, it gets compressed, it gets passed along the CAN bus, it gets queued up, it gets decompressed, it gets queued up again, object detection runs, the result of that gets queued up for the next stage... and before long you're lucky if you haven't burned a whole second of time.
Machines can drive aggressively.
There was a university that had self-driving cars do parallel parking... by drifting. Driving along, the car would find a parking spot on the other side of the road. It would steer hard to that side, break traction, swing the rear of the vehicle around sideways through a 180-degree turn, and finally skid sideways into the spot. The car did this perfectly.
That kind of ability is something that I personally don't have. I would consider a self-driving car that could do this. If I'm paying, and that kind of driving is my preference, I expect to get it.
That sort of drifting parallel park might work most or nearly all of the time, but if the road conditions are poor and the car loses handling then it will be a lot more risky.