While incredibly sad, this incident is not terribly surprising because the technology is nowhere near safe enough. Unfortunately, this will inevitably set the

While incredibly sad, this incident is not terribly surprising because the technology is nowhere near safe enough. Unfortunately, this will inevitably set the field back by at least 10 years with stricter regulations. We've seen the same with pharma and aviation, where innovation was slowed drastically and is only realistic for big companies. This is especially true here because if self-driving vehicles get banned from public roads, companies like Waymo will be forced to develop bigger private "test tracks" that approximate cities to have any hope of building deployable technology, and they will face the same fundamental limitation – the data will come from an approximation/model and not the actual location with real-life scenarios. Although there's no doubt that regulations are crucial to prevent such mishaps, I do hope lawmakers can find the right equilibrium on the tradeoff between safety and innovation.