You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, in the same way you learn to drive a normal car defensively. Pay attention to your surroundings, blind spots, and other cars.
Maybe self-driving is a poor term to use.
My point was that you can't learn to drive a normal car defensively if there are self-driving cars on the road (in their current form).
When a self-driving car decides to do something stupid, you won't see it coming because the decision tree is literally beyond human comprehension.
See: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181204-why-we-should-worry...
And Uber's and Tesla's accidents have shown us that you can't rely on the human in the car to catch it before it does something stupid. After all, teaching someone how to drive and watching them attentively is difficult work.
Tesla's marketing videos for Autopilot have a caption along the lines of "driver is only present for legal reasons".
Then it is not a self driving car, maybe let's named them human supervised self running cars
There are no self-driving cars on the market, or in development by major car manufacturers.
They all explicitly require human attention.
Yeah, we can go back and investigate the person's life and say "see, they had a history of browsing extremist websites, making bigoted comments, suicidal thoughts, etc." The problem is that this description fits a very large group of people, compared to the subgroup which actually carry out the attacks.
So while it is true that we may have difficulty (or it may even be impossible) auditing a self driving car after the fact, it should not be any more comforting to know that human failure can be explained after the fact, given that the human failure was not predicted beforehand.
One can learn to drive defensively, and be able to spot the said dipshit in advance, decreasing the likelihood of collision.
Yes, not in all cases, but there's a bell curve. As humans, we can read other humans.
Robots aren't inherently bad either. I love my Roomba precisely because if it fails, it fails predictably. I can and do make my apartment Roomba-friendly.
But the self-driving deep learning-driven cars don't have this feature. They fail unpredictabily, as in your example. We don't have an understanding of what really drives the decision-making there. And we keep discovering failure modes as they manifest.
One day, the car might think the river is a road. Another, it will not recognize a road block as such. But only if it's a Tuesday. Or something. We really don't know.
So I don't think we'll get acclimated to that. Unpredictable failure is a reasonable thing to be afraid of.