SELF-DRIVING CARS

An Uber self-driving test car killed a woman at night who was crossing the street (https://www.barrons.com/articles/so-much-for-the-self-driving-car-1521487131?mod=djemb_dr_h)

You can see the problem with the Uber test car hitting the woman with the bicycle in the following video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuo8eq9C3Ec

An interesting correction to the problem was made by Notehound at: http://boards.fool.com/otuber-video-of-hitting-pedestrian-33019570.aspx
The Uber car in this video obviously does not have its high-beam headlights on, even though it is not approaching a car coming in the opposite direction.
   At 40 MPH, even a drowsy driver like the lady behind the wheel of this Uber car could have slammed on the brakes or veered around the pedestrian if the high beam headlights had been in use.
   If self-driving cars cannot auto-dim and illuminate high-beam headlights and stop or steer around a slow-moving pedestrian at 40 MPH, there is no way they are safe enough to be used on any road where deer or dogs may be crossing the road at night.
   Someone at Uber needs to be programming in "high beam/low beam headlight switches," as well as a simple "deer detection system" - or there will be plenty of collisions on a daily basis as soon as self-driving cars are turned loose on most of the country where animals roam.

It occurs to me that an additional problem we are facing is that anything new demands perfection even though it may be considerably better than the present. Now testing of self-driving cars is on hold in one company because one of their cars killed a pedestrian crossing a street outside the crossing lines. If we demand zero deaths from self-driving cars, we will never have them. But what if self-driving cars result in 50% fewer deaths (My guess is that even in their current state, they will do better than this). Wouldn't that be a worthwhile advance? Wouldn't a cut from 30,000 deaths per year to 15,000 be an advance?

It could be that there is a limit to technological advances that are tolerated.

On automated hamburger flipping, suppose that 1 out of a thousand hamburgers are not cooked enough to kill toxins so that someone dies. Will this sort of thing kill such automation?

I don't know the answer but there seems to be a trend that we go back to the Good Old Days of the 1950s. That is where our president would like to take us (revitalize steel when we produce more than 80 MILLION tons a year now and aluminum that was more expensive). His chief of staff likes that idea too of the age when women were treasured, though he himself just trashed a woman Representative. Back to the age of no woman being beaten by a drunk husband and an age that was ushered in by the Berlin blockade and contained the Hungarian uprising and Sputnik showed that the Soviets had the intercontinental missile.

I lived through that age and I was terrified. That romantic view of the 1950s never was.