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I agree. The system was clearly not prepared for a real-world test. "Human jaywalks with bicycle" is not a one-in-a-million event.

I'm not sure if this is legally possible, but frankly I think the humans made the decision to let it on the streets should be personally charged as well.

Yes, starting with the governor, who was very interested in bringing "self-driving" cars to the state without all the pesky regulation and testing. (There are plenty of examples of excessive regulation, but if there's one place where there should be some, it's when 2-3 ton autonomous vehicles are traveling down the road.)

If the car was expected to have software that was foolproof, why hire and pay a driver at all?

The unsafe behavior of the pedestrian is a red herring here.

The system was not prepared for the presence of people with bicycles on the road who are not crossing the road, but rather using it, and doing so properly.

There is no reason to believe that this car would not have struck a properly behaving cyclist.

The system did identify the cyclist as such but didn't react to the hazard.

My understanding so far was that erratic behavior was the norm rather than sporadic exceptions and that it was common that a driver had to take over. I mean, we keep hearing about Tesla "self driving" cars that are really anything but, and I wouldn't be very surprised if Uber's SDV had similarly poor levels of autonomy. Also, it has been pointed out time and again that the dashcam dynamic range didn't reflect what a human would have been able to see if they were just looking at the road like they were supposed to.

> Here, Uber put a "driver" in control of the car that by design wasn't able to avoid collisions with pedestrians

To play devils advocate, doesn't this describe any profession involving regular vehicles (mail delivery, taxi drivers, etc)? If a taxi driver gets into an accident for dozing off and relying on auto-braking features that aren't there (either because he does in his personal car, but not in his work car, or a company technician forgot to reconnect it after a repair or whatever), whose fault should that be?

people do get charged if they run down pedestrians due to negligence.

Sure, but which people? The parent is saying Uber (the company) should be charged, but given the circumstances, I'm not sure if that makes sense.

>If Uber had directed a five year old to drive the SUV, with a back-up driver ready to take control, I think everyone would agree that qualifies as gross negligence notwithstanding the presence of the back-up driver.

This is a bad analogy. First, Uber's software is much better than a 5 year old. A 5 year old would have hit something well before a jaywalking pedestrian. Second, the backup driver was fully capable of stopping the vehicle, or navigating around the jaywalker. The person they hired is responsible for safe operation of the vehicle. They failed.

Criminal negligence seems to me to be more appropriate than manslaughter. They disabled safety features and replaced them with their own which failed to function correctly. They whole testing program seems to have been rushed and corners were cut.

The devil is in the details, so they say, but what you describe is not negligence. They didn't disable a safety feature and do nothing, they replaced a safety feature with something else. You'd need to make the case that this something else was somehow deficient in some material way and management shipped this feature knowing it was materially deficient for this to be negligence.

Why don't we instead start with the individual who was supposed to be monitoring the road and the vehicle's systems? It's well known at this point that they in fact were negligent in their duty.

they disabled both the built-in emergency braking system and their replacement emergency braking system. they absolutely did disable a safety feature and did not have anything in its place.

They still had a person in the car who was supposed to be operating, in effect, as an emergency braking system.

As you acknowledge, the human was only the secondary driver. That meant that Uber put a primary driver in the car that was designed to not stop for pedestrians.

Manslaughter is what you charge someone with when their willful negligence leads to a death.

I think we'll see subpoenas for e-mails/slack messages and people digging through documents trying to figure out which manager/dev made this decision.

One small mistake, on something so critical, can ruin many peoples' lives.

Negligence that results in death is manslaughter by gross negligence.

The Texas version requires recklessness, and I think that's met here.

The human driver is also at fault and maybe even more so than the company. Don't know what his instructions were, but probably the main reason to have him on the drivers seat was exactly to avoid this kind of situation. The guy should have been paying attention to the road, ready to take over, not staring at his phone completely oblivious of what was going on.

This situation in a way is very similar to another story that was on HN yesterday about a guy who got "fired by a machine". We are putting a huge amount of trust on automatic systems, sometimes without a failsafe mechanism. This inevitably leads to bad consequences.

The problem is that no human can actually be that attentive to such a system for hours on end day after day. Uber set an impossible task for these drivers. We shouldn't let them claim the existence of these drivers as legal protection from their own obvious negligence.

> The problem is that no human can actually be that attentive to such a system for hours on end day after day. Uber set an impossible task for these drivers. We shouldn't let them claim the existence of these drivers as legal protection from their own obvious negligence.

Did the driver got a driving license? What does that driving license tell him to do in a car? That is FAR more important than what you boss tell you, it's the freaking law.

It's like saying if you kill someone in your car after a long day of work, you aren't responsible because your boss gave you an impossible task to drive your car after such long hour. You are still freaking responsible of your driving. Can't do it? Then don't do it, it's that simple.

Put as much blame as you want on Uber, it doesn't change the fact that she drove that car and killed that person.

I think you are missing the point a little as that is not an apt comparison. The "driver" was not operating the vehicle. They were tasked with monitoring it's function to step in and take control if something went wrong but humans are notoriously bad at this exact task. Now I definitely believe the person is culpable here but it's also murky based on how Uber instructed them to operate the vehicle and how much they said you can trust the autonomous driving features.

Yes, and the individuals fail in that context (i.e., the driver is at fault), but the greater failure is the management decision to put the system in the wild and create serious risk other unuspecting and more importantly, un-consenting, people.

Anything less is skapegoating and letting the managers get away with manslaughter (in this case).

The whole lot needs to be prosecuted, not only the driver (who also should not get let off)

I agree. We have this notion of creating corporations so that shareholders are not liable for anything. Maybe shareholders should be liable when they break laws and kill people.

The corporation can be charged as an entity itself, independent of any shareholder or executive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_convicted_of...

I understand that. In those cases, the only negative impact to shareholders is potentially losing money. Maybe shareholders should have more responsibility.

Should the pensioners whose pensions are invested in index funds be sent to jail for Uber's actions? Where would this culpability end?

I don't know. I have wondered that as well. We currently have a system where the most wealthy benefit and have no skin in the game. That seems wrong to me. I welcome any solution that makes people think about the entities they support.

I'm amused by the downvotes for a controversial question. Check out http://paulgraham.com/say.html

It's not that it's controversial, it's just that it's not a workable idea, or at least you haven't proposed any way to make it workable. That article, if I recall correctly, is about cultural taboos. I don't think this is one of those.

Stepping up the level of fines and corporate penalties to be greater than the expected gains from bad behavior is a much more workable solution. Companies were much more careful to not act too monopolistically when the government was in full trust busting mode.

You don't think it is a cultural taboo here on HN to question the wisdom of unfettered libertarian, free market entrepreneurship?

Yes, the fines should probably be increased and enforced. But if I, as an investor, decide to put $10 into Uber, I only risk my $10 if Uber kills more people and breaks more laws. It seems to me I should have more responsibility than that for encouraging such behavior.

This destroys capitalism, you can't move the criminal risk to the shareholders. Increased monetary risk, sure: like corporations convicted of crimes have to give money in restitution before making shareholders whole; or even go the next step and make major shareholders liable for covering that restitution (if it exceeds assets on hand) in addition to eating the loss of stock. But for capitalism to function, investing must only lead to monetary penalties (but we could certainly make them stronger).

If you have to, move it to executives, it could actually justify the insane salaries and bonuses.

No, this is the system we used to have in the robber baron era and it functioned. It just leads to the concentration of control of large enterprises in the hands of individuals and small groups.

An objective debate over the future of capitalism is something our society needs.

I am not convinced that investors having more skin in the game would destroy capitalism. Maybe it would destroy our local interpretation of capitalism. Maybe that is a good thing.

Great, so do those shareholders all get criminal records?

Maybe they should. The executives of Uber have the tacit approval of the investors.

> shareholders should be liable when they break laws and kill people

Shareholders shouldn't (unless there's clear mens rea, such as when they set up the corporation in order to break laws) but officers of the corporation should, and probably already are.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Until it isn't. If you can show that willful negligence on the part of specific individuals then a suit against them directly can go through.

Limited liability. If you can show that specific shareholders were willfully negligent then you can go after them directly.

That is not how it appears to function in practice. The investors of Uber are well aware that Uber is breaking laws. They are making a perfectly rational decision that it will pay off.

> investors of Uber are well aware

That's an extraordinarily huge presumption to make about someone, especially, in practice, an "investor" isn't even a natural person.

Moreover, the "person" who owns the shares may not be the one who made the purchase decision, such as with venture capital, hedge funds, and mutual funds [1].

Even an individual, natural person may buy a particular stock based purely on financials, or even just price (such as day traders). No awareness of business practices is necessary.

Then there's short-selling. Who owns those shares, at which point in time?

Most of these questions (ownership, not purchase decision responsibility) do need to have an answer for the purpose of corporate voting, but only occasionally and not to determine criminal liability for an arbitrary point in time. The latter would be remarkably impractical, if not unfair.

[1] Assuming one pierces that "veil" of ownership

At the bottom of those chains of ownership are individual humans. Our systems of law and commerce should serve people, not the other way around.

My understanding is that Uber is privately held, mostly by venture capitalists who expect it to increase in value once it monopolizes the market. We are not talking about a publicly held, well-governed organization.

I have a feeling in the software dev stack, they were like "Let's test out our computer vision. We can disable x and y. It's okay because we have a human driver."

Any assistant features reduce driver awareness. Take the Tesla car that crashed into a barrier. Even if the driver had hands on the wheel, the fact the car was auto-lane adjusting well for so long can relax the drivers cognitive functions. You start thinking about other things, and not even realize your lane assistant feature, improperly named "auto-pilot" lost its tracking and is now driving you into a barrier. You're dead.

Uber shouldn't have had these cars on the road, and they certainly shouldn't have disabled any safety features because they thought they could rely on drivers to stay alert after eight+ hours a day in these things.

Just out of curiosity, what if a road had concave shaped lanes such that the steering was always biased toward the center of the lane. Then at some point the surface changes. Would that have a similar effect of causing drivers to potentially crash at that point?

If not, then any driver assisted implementation should emulate the feel of a concave road (or road ruts) as much as possible. Make it so that the car is more comfortable to drive, but just subtle enough so that the driver's attention doesn't drift too much.

Honda has its own “Honda sensing” system which enables adaptive cruise control, line keep assist and emergency braking. If you are about to leave road/line ut vibrates the steering wheel to get your attention. If it thinks you are not holding the wheel it also warns you and after some time disengages.

The problem is that legally speaking these systems aren't treated as the primary driver, they're treated as an optional feature, basically just an enhanced form of cruise control, etc. Where they might get into legal trouble is if the driver was not properly informed of his duties. But I'm assuming it was pretty clear he wasn't supposed to be watching TV, he was supposed to be watching for the car to make a mistake and then correct it.

> Uber disabled Uber's own emergency braking system (not just the built-in Volvo one) “to reduce potential for erratic behavior.”[1]

I thought the emergency system was only disabled for the computer so that it doesn't accidentally activate it. I think the driver was still able to activate the emergency system.

"Uber" should be charged with manslaughter -- but who specifically? The driver appears to be the most logical party if they were the one in operation of the vehicle.

You can’t imprison a corporation.

Corporations cannot act, as they do not have hands. Only individuals can break the law.

You could revoke its articles of incorporation couldn’t you? Or put them under a consent decree if they don’t want that. Or perhaps force a regulator inside the company.

Just a high enough fine (and I mean HIGH) would still do something.

As it is there is no hit to Uber except their stock price for killing someone through gross negligence.

Want results? The CEO of Uber should get charged with manslaughter.