Likely the more apt word is liable.

In law you split that into criminal and civil. Very unlikely there will be any criminal charge, hence no criminal liability but it’s possible.

Civil liability is more interesting, but if the deceased’s estate brings suit it opens up a can of worms in the discovery process. Every internal communication, prior incident, etc...

At the end of the day it’s not much different than any other vehicular fatality case, but there will be a defective product component (again nothing unheard of in the case of vehicular fatalities). At the end of the day the car will be insured for accidents, so we will probably learn more about the insurance coverage for self-driving cars.

Corporate manslaughter is still criminal.

Obviously Uber in this case, but as mentioned in response to a separate article, AI's must be like pets or children and have a liable guardian.

Not obviously. Let's wait to judge until we have the facts. The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. There's not a whole lot of information about the events that lead up to the accident. It is possible that a pedestrian is at fault if they stepped in the way of moving traffic outside of a crosswalk. It's also possible Uber's cars are not up to the task of driving on public roadways.

The penalty for walking outside a crosswalk is not death.

Arizona requires drivers to "exercise due care to avoid colliding with a pedestrian". If a fatality results, but due care was taken by the driver to avoid it, then the tragic accident is just that, an accident.

Like my comment says, let's wait until we have facts before passing judgement.

Sure, we don't know many of the details.

But from this distance, things don't look good for the technology or the future of autonomous trials on public roads.

The evidence that due care was not taken will pretty much be the existence of the fatality.

There surely will be video, from the car itself and also perhaps third party security or traffic cameras. The level of carelessness we are going to have to see in order for a jury to blame the victim will be pretty high.

I agree with the final paragraph in your comment. All I'm saying is let's reserve judgement until we know what happened.

As for a fatality proving that due care was not taken, I agree. It doesn't tell you who failed to take due care though.

Who would the guardian (and therefore responsible) be - the driver or the car manufacturer? Sounds like a circular argument to me!

In this case, the driver is an Uber employee, and the automation is Uber-created and deployed, so the driver is the car manufacturer.