Arizona is picked as a testbed for self driving cars precisely because regulations are so lax.

Regulations are written with blood.

Unsurprisingly, not the blood of the regulators.

What kind of regulations does Arizona have?

I've recently wondered why there isn't some sort of "test", where they throw various scenarios at the self-driving cars, and see how they react.

These would have been the 1st battery tests by the car company, surely? Child chasing ball is obviously important scenario. Lidar/sw didnt recognize human/bike combo? But blob was moving & system failed to see or avoid moving blob.That makes me think there should also be a pretrip system check like airlines.

Yeah, well, whatever. "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs," to quote another comment from this discussion. /s

Apparently killing bystanders is now okay, if there's a software component to the massacre.

To wit it was not "driverless" as there was a supposed "safety driver" behind the wheel.

What controls does Uber have that the "safety driver" is doing their job? When the computer gets confused or its computed probability drops below a threshold, when and how does it alert the driver. How many of these self driving testbeds have a person in the seat just for CYA and not actual safety ?

I'd like to see Uber's logs of all the other pedestrian and vehicle near misses where the computer took corrective action.

What testing did Uber do on a closed course with adversarial conditions? Ball rolls into road with a child following, pedestrians walking under a flickering street lamp, people dressed in costumes, a parade, a protest, service workers, a pickup truck with a lost load.

Would be cool if the driver had to placebo-drive and the car used that input to assess discrepancies and validate confidence.

When the driver fails to do a task that the computer seems necessary with a high degree of confidence, both get shutdown for further evaluation.

I don't think that would work. Driving is not a fully conscious, deliberate see-analyze-act loop. A lot of your control movements are subconscious, and you expect instant, correct feedback from the vehicle. To see what I mean - if you've ever played a racing game, try opening a racing replay/Let's play video on YouTube, pretend for a while that you're in control (use your WASD keys), and see how your brain complains about your inputs having no impact on reality.

From the video it appears that the safety driver was checking her phone at the time of the incident.