The more after reports on accidents involving self driving cars I've read, the more I've become convinced that the current state of the art in this field is mer

The more after reports on accidents involving self driving cars I've read, the more I've become convinced that the current state of the art in this field is merely an illusion. Reading between the lines, the complete disregard for basic safety protocols like you've just described comes across as more than just a brazen continuation of the "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley culture. Viewed in this light, this entire niche of tech R&D begins to take on the appearance of a giant game of smoke and mirrors being played for the benefit of those recipients of Big Investment $$$ that wooed investors to bet big with promises of delivering a marketable self-driving car within the next decade. The way I see it,there is only way to make sense of a field where the most respectable R&D house (Google/Alphabet) limits their vehicle to a relative snail's pace while everyone else (including notoriously unethical shops like Uber) is taking a gung-ho, "the only limit is the speed limit" approach. That is to assume "everyone else" is cheating the game by choosing a development path that gives the appearance of being functional in the "rough but will get there with enough polish" sense while the truth is that it's merely a mountain of cheap and dirty hacks that will never achieve the goals demanded by investors. The only reason a company would overlook such a simple safety protocol as "slow down until a potentially dangerous object is positively identified" is if their "AI" fails to positively identify objects so frequently that the car could never achieve what a human passenger would consider a consistent, normal driving pace. The same can be said for any "AI" that can't be trusted to initiate panic braking in response to a positively identified collision scenario with a positively identified object. The fact that they specifically wrote an "AI" absolving workaround for that scenario their software means the frequency of false positives must be so high as to make the frequency of "false alarm" panic braking incidents unacceptable for human passengers.