"Bryant Walker Smith, a self-driving car expert and law professor at the University of South Carolina, said in an email that the report by The Information raised the question of whether Uber’s “software might have detected something but misclassified as something other than a human (which could include determining that the probability of that something being a human was low).”
False positives and negatives have long been a challenge for self-driving and semi-autonomous driving systems, he said, but said that detecting a pedestrian crossing a street “doesn’t seem like a edge case” that would have been difficult for a self-driving car to handle."