At the risk of sounding macabre, the engineers will be pouring over thousands of lines of logs and if Uber self driving cars ever do survive to make it onto the roads again, the circumstance of woman's death and the after analysis will mean it will never ever happen again. I expect that during the coming years we will analyse car crashes with the same scrutiny as airplane crashes with the hope to solve every single edge case. RIP.
That's a very optimistic view of what will happen -- or I suppose a pessimistic one. I agree that there will be a lot of scrutiny of the logs, but unless they identify an actual bug ("Oh shit, we had a buffer overrun right here!") it's not necessarily going to be possible to preclude this or something very similar from happening again.
The driving of an autonomous vehicle is an emergent event of large numbers of complicated and in some cases opaque subsystems. Changing the interactions of these subsystems in a narrow way to preclude this particular kind of event is not necessarily something they'll be able to figure out a way to do without causing more problems.
But it's still optimistic compared to todays current status quo. We now have a system we can optimize and build into to make our best effort to prevent in future events.
Which is how it similar to airplane crashes, as it's a heavily automated and centralized system (ie, humans are far less a factor in the event than cars, which can't be optimized nearly as easily).
While cars have had improvements in safety via vehicle design, and popular culture, road signs, traffic laws, etc can influence human behaviour to drive differently, I don't think there has ever been a better time to reduce these events if not everytime, then at least far less often than the current standard.
Which is what is so often missing in these conversations: a rational baseline and a clear reliable process that we will now be in a better position going forward for this not to happen again (assuming the right processes are in place, which they may very well not be in this case).
