The US has a very hostile view towards pedestrians, in large part due to PR campaigns by car companies. The term jaywalking was invented to slander pedestrians not crossing “correctly” (jay is a synonym for rube).

So your view is that Uber specifically chose to not classify pedestrians correctly because of car maker propaganda? You actually believe that?

No, the view is that Uber (and city officials, and some of the press) are spinning hard to shift the blame to the victim of this manslaughter, by using words such as jaywalker.

FYI, this is an American thing[1]. There's no jaywalker in Russian, for instance. Or French. If you know any other language that has a word for that, let me know.

It didn't even spread to the UK:

"In other countries such as the United Kingdom, the word is not generally used and there are no laws limiting how pedestrians can use public highways."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term

FYI, your own link has a list of jurisdictions that have jaywalking or jaywalking-like laws. Did you even read it?

I feel like if someone's out walking around they're probably just doing it for fun or exercise and don't have anywhere important to be. People in cars are more likely to be on a schedule. One of the reasons I think it makes more sense to favor cars in most situations.

I have walked around outside in order to get places almost every day since I moved out of Arizona years ago. Even in the car-centric US, huge numbers of people live in places that aren’t quite so car-centric as Phoenix.

In reasonably dense U.S. cities, people walk into the road outside of crosswalks all the time. Even in suburban areas, it's normal to cross like that in residential areas. But suburban areas are often crisscrossed by 30-50 mph streets where crossing the street outside of crosswalks (or sadly even in crosswalks, really) is dangerous. This is partly because of the speed limit. But also partly because there are few pedestrians (points of interest are far apart so people need to drive everywhere), so drivers are relatively reckless.

I'm not convinced that the pedestrian outside crosswalk omission arose because of U.S. car-centric thinking. I think if any software engineer working on the project was told that their autonomous driving system wasn't watching out for these pedestrians, they'd be horrified. In fact, probably many of them were already horrified at how poorly their system was performing in general, and yet management still deployed the software in actual physical cars.

Nobody is blaming the engineers here, they are not the ones who get to decide when to launch.

Perhaps they should be the ones who get to decide. In many safety-critical fields they do. That's the point of requiring an engineer's stamp of approval on a design.