It seems more likely that the manufacturer will blamed. Society already has experience dealing with inhuman harm from devices. If a phone explodes on its own, no one is calling for all phones to be banned.

A small number of Chevy Bolts have had their batteries ignite spontaneously, nobody has been killed, and now there are a bunch of parking garages that have banned Chevy Bolts from parking there.

Maybe not all autonomous cars will be banned when someone is killed, but I wouldn't be shocked if the same thing happened to whatever company that built the car in question that happened to Uber after they killed an innocent bystander.

> Maybe not all autonomous cars will be banned when someone is killed

Well that's exactly my point. The manufacturer and model of the self-driving car will be blamed and possibly banned, but not all self-driving cars will be. The first pedestrian death isn't going to be blamed on all autonomous cars.

If a phone explodes, many businesses outlaw that brand and maybe narrow that to a model. With prior example, do you think the same won’t happen with a self-driving car?

That's my point. The manufacturer and model of the self-driving car will be blamed and possibly banned, but not all self-driving cars will be.

Consensus is a gradient, and representative consensus is multiple gradients.

Techies are a very narrow band in any of these gradients.

Regular people are very wide bands, and there's a reason horror sci-fi movies where robots kill humankind are extremely popular.

You're both right and wrong at the same time. The media gets to decide, as always, what we're collectively outraged about. Or to be more specific, the people who control the media. So if you want to predict if people are going to care when someone gets killed by a robocar, it depends on who stands to make or lose money if they do or don't.