The woman that the Uber car hit was jaywalking at 2:00am! The car that hit her was doing 37mph in a 45mph speed zone. The back-up driver being on their phone looking at a movie was irrelevant. When pilots hand off control of an aircraft to one another there is a period of transition while the first pilot remains in control and the second pilot gets their bearings. If humans are to serve as 'back-up' drivers for AV systems then they cannot be allowed to disengage their awareness of what the car is doing anymore than the driver of a standard car can disengage their awareness. It simply takes human beings too much time to react to a fast developing situation to have any hope of being usefull. AV back-up of human drivers? Ya think??!! Now there is a niche ripe for exploitation. AV reactions are inhumanly fast and in many situations that might overwhelm a human driver the AV would stay calm and could bring a vehicle back from a potential disaster. But not this one. That woman was doomed the nanosecond her feet hit the roadway. Nothing could have saved her and that is why Uber was not sanctioned.
I think its wrong to stick people in the cockpits of these thing and then tell them they can actually save it if the AV screws up. Yeah, right. Only a human is likely to have that much hubris as to think such a thing is actually true. You drive a car or you don't. When you are in a dual controlled car with an instructor s/he is ENGAGED. When you are flying in a dual controlled aircraft with an instructor, s/he is ENGAGED. When that Budweiser semi-truck made that 120 mi. run from Wisconsin to Colorado (?) the human hung out in the back of the cab. What were they going to do if the truck got into trouble from back there? Their job was to navigate the local streets to the Interstate on-ramp and take control again to make the last leg to the distributor.
AV's are going to have accidents! Many will argue that that is a sign of their unfitness. Maybe, but probably not. The physics of very large masses is pretty concrete. The Tesla driver who was NOT driving a fully autonomous vehicle but was not ENGAGED was at fault in his own demise. That is not a mark against Tesla. It should have 'seen' the truck. Maybe. I'm sure it does now, and more besides. These things probably see in x-ray as well as infrared, LIDAR, RADAR, SONAR and plain old 'eyesight'. When they really are perfected they will be BETTER than you. That's just the way it is. If you don't want to spend the second half of your life starving to death you will support Progressive politicians that are arguing strenuously for taxes and other compensations from the companies that are poising themselves to completely automate every possible human function that allows ordinary people to earn a living. Every single one. Not even doctors are safe. Robotic scalpels and diagnostic algorithms will put thousands of doctors on the unemployment lines in the coming decades and unless we act now to insist that they pay into a general fund for a Basic Income for all Americans you will be very hungry.