The average human apparently has a 2.3 second delay to unexpected, interruptive stimulus while driving (https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf). We almost never perceive it as such because we tend to measure our own reaction times from the point we are conscious of stimulus to the point we take willful action to respond to it, but the hard numbers appear to show that critical information can take 1+ seconds to percolate to conscious observation (remember, the brain spends a lot of time figuring out what in the soup of sensory nonsense is worthy of attention).
Whether this time is shorter or longer for humans is another question entirely (though the human intelligences' ability to deduce intent from behavior and forecast actions of other humans in traffic should give robocars a good challenge in that department as well). But in terms of raw reaction time after determining "I have to brake NOW", a human is definitely faster than one second.
To put things into perspective, the Uber spend 4 seconds after actually detecting the incursion trying to figure out whether it needed to respond and doing nothing, then a further second of enforced pause after concluding it did need to do something until finally starting to reduce speed 0.2 seconds before impact.
> the time from incursion start to throttle release included the reaction time of the tow vehicle driver pulling the foam car (which was consistently less than 200 milliseconds)
> A hardcoded 1 second delay during a potential emergency situation. Horrifying.
Also laughable, if it wasn't so horrifying. The self driving car evangelists always argue how much faster their cars could react than humans. It's basically their main selling point and the reason why these things ought to be so much safer than humans.
Sorry, but I as a human don't have a one second delay built in. That's an absurdly slow reaction time for which I would have to be seriously drunk to not beat it.