It hasn't shown that at all. It has documented beyond reasonable doubt that Uber should not be allowed to participate in real world tests of autonomous vehicles.
There are plenty of situations where people would fully accept a self driving vehicle killing someone but this isn't one of those.
Uber had a fatality after 3 million miles of driving.
The mean fatality rate is approximately 1 per 100 million miles of driving.
It's a sample size of one, so the error bars are big, but it drives me insane that people are acting like the Uber cars are the ideal driverless cars of the imagined future, and are super safe. The available data (which is limited, but not that limited) is that Uber driverless cars are much, much, much more dangerous than mean human drivers.
That actually sounds like a really interesting concept, one of those ideas that seems obvious only after someone suggests it. What company is this?
Right now, in the Seattle area, we are basically seeing a new littering epidemic in the form of sharable bicycles being left to rust away, unused, at random places. If the bike could cruise to its next user autonomously, that would be really be a game-changer. "Bikes on demand" would turn bikesharing from (IMHO) a stupid idea into something that just might work.
Plus, the engineering challenges involved in automating a riderless bicycle sound fun.
The biggest challenge will probably be to keep people from screwing with the bikes, of course. :( An unoccupied bicycle cruising down the street or sidewalk will fire all sorts of mischievous neurons that onlookers didn't even know they had.
What the Uber crash has shown us is mostly the willingness of people on HN to excuse Silicon Valley darlings even when they actually demonstrably kill people.
This is an analogy that cannot completely map to cycling.
A fall at any speed from a bike is literally a potentially crippling or deadly scenario.
For elderly people, I would guess that's accurate.
A friend of mine, in his 50's very fit, cycling to work and back every day, broke both his arms while doing literally a 10-meter test drive in front of a bike store.
The bike's brakes were setup reversed compared to what he used to, so he ended up breaking with the front brake, flipping the bike over and breaking both his arms while landing. His fault? Sure, but still a rather scary story how quickly even mundane things can go really wrong.
My company didn't start with this zero tolerance thing in our minds, but it turns out our self-delivering electric bicycles have a huge advantage for real world safety because they weigh ~60lbs when in autonomous mode and are limited to 12mph. This equals the kinetic energy of myself walking at a brisk pace, or basically something that won't kill purely from blunt force impact. I think the future for autonomy will be unlocked by low mass and low speed vehicles, not cars converted to drive themselves.