Driverless taxi runs a person over. Who could have seen this coming?

I feel as though we are sprinting into letting the robots take over the world just like Terminator suggested it would. While I have never actually seen a driverless taxi, let alone rode in one, I would be extremely apprehensive to get into something that doesn't have a person operating it. This sort of sci-fi stuff, to me, is something that should be left to the movies.

Some things are better off being automated but when it comes to vehicles, I think that at least for now we should stick to having a human behind the wheel.

The only reason why I am now talking about this is because a friend of mine recently had to go to San Francisco on business and was taking photos of the taxis that had no driver. I actually didn't even know that such a service existed and had thought we were still in the testing phases. The cars are still in operation and I guess you could say that they have a pretty good track record thus far, except for one incident that I suppose the company that owns the vehicles did a pretty damn good job keeping out of the public eye.

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The company which is called Cruise, had to recall all 950 of its taxis after a pedestrian ended up trapped underneath it and was dragged some 20 feet as the vehicle pulled over, which is likely part of the programming. In defense of the self-driving taxis, the pedestrian was initially struck by a car that had a human driver and I guess the sensors simply cannot respond that quickly. Details are not very clear at this point but because of this one incident, The California Public Utilities Commission pulled Cruise's permit that allows them to operate these taxis in the first place.

Now here is where I am a little bit on the fence as far as all of this is concerned: This is a singular incident and it wouldn't have happened had it not been for the human-driven car hitting the pedestrian in the first place. Is it fair that this company is being blamed for the incident? From what I can tell the problem as far as government is concerned wasn't that the pedestrian was struck, it was that the car was unaware of the fact that the person it hit was actually trapped under the car and therefore drug them to the side of the road.

The complaint is that the taxi should have remained stationary after an accident rather than pulling over to the side of the road and I guess this is fair enough because I am pretty sure that this is the rule for when a human driver gets into an accident, isn't it?

Cruise has 950 taxis in their fleet. I wonder how many pedestrians have been struck by cars with drivers in them per 1000 cars in the same time period?

The only "dumb" thing about this story in my world is that I don't feel that a singular incident like this should result in the complete shutdown of a company. I read a follow up article that stated that Cruise has already begun the process of laying off hundreds of workers because of this. In my mind, the government is a bit nuts when it comes to safety and the pursuit of a zero-injury policy when it comes to anything. I am immediately reminded of how playgrounds were when I was younger. There were swings and jungle gyms that at any moment could have resulted in paralysis for everyone involved. Gigantic wooden castle like structures would result in basically everyone getting at least a splinter or two. Rust covered monstrosities that we played on kept us all up to date on our tetanus shots and those slides reached the temperature of a deep fryer mid-summer.... yet almost all of us managed to somehow survive all of that. These days the world has become so obsessed with there being zero chance of injury that we are actually making the world a lot less fun than it used to be.

I say let the driverless taxis continue... you always have the choice of not using one if you feel like it. Pedestrians get hit by cars, this isn't going to change because Cruise has to recall all of their cars for a software update... and in the meantime hundreds of people are going to have their financial livelihoods destroyed. It just doesn't seem like a reasonable reaction.