Don't understand the hang up about this. Self Driving cars were always going to kill people. It's not possible to be 100% safe but even a minute improvement over human drivers would save thousands of lives a year.
Uber has had a fatal accident with only a few million miles driven when an average human will go more like a hundred million miles per fatality.
I don't understand why people insist on believing that they are already more safe than human drivers when the evidence suggests that they are currently much, much less safe.
Nonsense. Uber's self-driving cars currently have something like 30x the fatality rate of an average driver and that is in cherry-picked locations that they chose for testing and with a human driver constantly watching it to take over when it does something wrong. There is no evidence that they are anywhere close to surpassing human drivers.
This Silicon Valley arrogance and recklessness has killed people. It's not just academic.