Uber is at fault, but...
Sure, Uber is at fault. It's pretty much a given that whenever something goes wrong with Uber, it's Uber's fault. And this case is particularly bad, because they "fixed" something that wasn't broken. But...
Having watched the video a few times, the woman seemed to come out of nowhere. Sure, it was a single camera, with a narrow-ish field of view. And the lighting wasn't good (or the video had been "downgraded" to make it look worse). But...
The but? Three of them. It was night, the radar range equation, and our peripheral vision.
It was night, so the car's headlights were on.. That's clear from the video.
The radar range equation says that the returned power is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the distance. The intensity of a radar (or light) beam is inversely proportional to the square of distance, what little is reflected is similarly subject to the inverse square law, so the returned power is inverse fourth power.
Our peripheral vision is more sensitive to faint light, and to changes in intensity, than our central vision. The same is not true of cameras and AI. Even if she had kept her eyes straight ahead, she'd have seen the lights from the car in her peripheral vision.
Where am I going with this? The light returned to the camera was inverse fourth power but the light seen by the woman was inverse square law, so a lot brighter. The car may not have seen the woman because of lighting conditions, field of view of camera, etc., but it's for damned sure the woman could see the car well in advance.
How can I be sure of this? In the past I lived in a rural location and occasionally had to walk twisty, hilly country roads. Roads with no pavement. Hedges dampened sound and blocked vision around bends. Which meant cars could come whizzing around corners without me being able to detect them until the last second and having to dive into a hedge. That was during the day. At night it was a very different matter. At night I could see the beams of the headlights from far away. Even if the car was coming up behind me the general increase in ambient illumination gave it away.
Let me make this very clear. Even with the brow of a hill and a sharp bend in the road between us, I could detect a car coming up behind me at least 30 seconds before it passed by me. It would be harder to detect a car coming up behind me in an area with street lighting, but a piece of piss to detect one coming towards me. I would be aware of the car long before the driver was aware of me.
The woman walked right into it. With every advantage over the driver and the automation, she walked right into it.
OK, it's harder to judge distances at night. Even knowing that car headlights are a car-width apart, it's harder to judge distances. Which makes you more cautious, right? That little thing about not crossing the road if traffic is coming that was drilled into us as kids, right? If it's harder to judge distances you cross more cautiously, right?
The only mitigation in her favour (maybe) is that few of us are taught a basic fact of geometry that is apparently not instinctual: if an object is in your field of view and maintains a constant angle to you, then you are on a collision course. I wasn't taught it, and was a little surprised as an adult when I read of it. It's apparently not instinctual in any vertebrate because birds and animals, as well as humans, get caught out by it. Even so, there was a car coming towards her. She could have waited for it to go by, just to be safe, but she walked right into it.
So yeah, Uber was at fault. But so was the woman.