If I see a child standing near the side of the road, I use more than the velocity and trajectory of the child to estimate future behavior: I look at the direction the child is facing, the overall situation (e.g. is the child playing a game?), what the child is paying attention to, and so on. A child waiting at a bus stop is a dramatically different scenario than a child looking across the street at a puppy. A short adult standing on the side of the road is dramatically different than a child.
This is a hard problem involving multiple levels of recognition and inference. I have little faith that it is solved. My suspicion is that the “engineering solution” is used (i.e. slow down when a human-probable object is near the road). That might work, but will lead to a car thar drives like a paranoid senior citizen with bad eyesight.
I have a suspicion that we’re going to look back in a decade and realize that most of these problems are fundamentally intractable, and that the best any system can do is react via human-encoded heuristics. If so, the path to full autonomy will be an asymptotic one; it will not happen quickly, but through decades of gradual refinement, with lots of fatalities along the way.
I think that the always-sensible speed choices of the automated system will result in a much larger reduction in pedestrian fatalities than any increase from the lack of subtle inference you are concerned with.
Intractable problems can be solved sometimes, just not reliably or in bounded time. If we get to the point where self-driving cars depend on human-encoded rules for reaction, we’ll simply be trading one set of messy heuristic behaviors (people) for another (robots with bad sensors and limited domain awareness).
Will the automated systems be “better” with enough time and investment? Perhaps. But dreams of a fatality-free automobile future will remain science fiction.
https://waymo.com/safetyreport/
I would guess that they already identify and track pedestrians better than the average human driver (mostly because I expect they do it at greater distance). Whether they model kids standing by the curb better is hard to say.