What? Why? The specific scenario is recorded, the surrounding conditions are known and relatively easy to reproduce, and there are both norms and requirements about human capabilities when driving a car. If we can't attempt to determine whether a human could have responded in this case, I'm not sure where we could determine anything about any kind of accountability.
People obviously make mistakes too -- I've hit a deer before, unfortunately. But when the consequences are high, we look into culpability about whether someone should have done more to prevent the mistake. Driving under the influence, without a license, etc. are all things that can make someone responsible for the big outcome of a relatively easy-to-make mistake. Accepting Uber's "could you react to this video I'm showing you?" defense is skipping all the steps that would let us assign responsibility or even learn / improve from the incident.
I’m sure you could do a blind study of this scenario but I’m sure people participating in a driving study in a simulator are not going to be driving as they do in real life. We see it every single day in the airline industry. It’s why we’re checked and observed at random intervals while out flying on the line. The surprise aspect gives you no time to prepare or study up to be in perfect shape like you do when you’re headed into a training event.
Which is a more honest representation. Humans might have hit someone crossing the street there say 1:100 or 1:10,000 times, but both of those are still possible. So, it's more a question of relative rates where a person or Uber car would avoid hitting the pedestrian in a similar situation.
At no point did I suggest that this would be an excuse to absolve Uber of any responsibility.
When people hit deer, it's not because the deer was casually walking across the road like a human jaywalker. It's because the deer jumps into your path in an instant. As somebody who's hit a deer and done plenty of urban driving with no shortage of jaywalkers, I can assure you there is no fair comparison. The only sort of situation that might be comparable is if somebody is trying to commit suicide by car and deliberately leaps in front of you, or if a small child concealed by a car parked by the side of the road runs out into the road suddenly. But those scenarios are unrelated to this incident.
From the report: ". At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2).[2] According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator."
For anyone interested in actually being informed about this incident. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HW...
NASA has a simple tool for studying this, the Multi-Attribute Test Battery.[1] It uses a Windows PC and a joystick. The person being tested uses the joystick to center a marker in a square. The marker tends to drift away, and has to be corrected. This simulates the most basic task of flying - flying straight and level.
There's an "autopilot", which can be turned on to keep the marker centered. The user can then let go of the joystick.
But sometimes the "autopilot" fails, and the marker drifts out of the square. How long it takes for the subject to notice is measured. That's a good approximation for Tesla's semi-automatic driving system.
There are lots of papers on this. It's well understood in aviation that takeover time after a fault is seconds to tens of seconds.
Even braking to half the recorded velocity would likely have been fatal.
This is not so. Half would have been under 25 mph which is much less than 50% fatal. See http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HW...
Additionally the automated system clearly recognized the situation and 1.6 seconds before impact determined it should be engaging the emergency brakes. However, Uber disabled those because the Human operator was responsible to take several seconds to reorient before doing an emergency brake.
How is this even comparable?
A deer jumping in front of a car is not the same as a person walking the bicycle slowly across several lanes (and almost making it to the other side) on a rather well-lit road.
This is NOT classical reaction time.