Agreed. Uber disabled a safety feature that would have prevented this fatality -- but that doesn't mean that the automation was therefore safe apart from Uber's

Agreed. Uber disabled a safety feature that would have prevented this fatality -- but that doesn't mean that the automation was therefore safe apart from Uber's mismanagement of it. It's entirely believable that had that safety feature been fully enabled, it would have also e-braked in 1,000 other situations which didn't result in a collision. And false-positive e-brake events are definitely worth avoiding: they can get you rear-ended and injure unbelted passengers. This doesn't mean that Uber therefore did the right thing in disabling the system; it probably means that the system shouldn't have been given control of the car in the first place. But my point is that there is no readiness level where driverless cars will ever be safe -- not in the same way that trains and planes are safe. The driving domain itself is intrinsically dangerous, and changing the vehicle control system doesn't change the nature of that domain. So if we actually care about safety, then we need to be changing the way that streets are designed and the rules by which they are used.