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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

Of course they were. Almost no one is capable of staying totally focused on a task they have no input in and is incredibly unstimulating. Even if they were looking at the road their thoughts would be "Oh, someone is crossing the road. The car will slow down for this. Oh shit it didn't and now its too late"

The car either drives itself with no user input required at all or it needs constant user input.

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Like most accidents, there were multiple factors:

1. Uber tests immature self-driving software on public roads. 2. Uber reduced number of safety drivers from 2 to 1. 3. Uber hired a convicted felon (attempted armed robbery) to do this job. 4. Single, convicted felon safety driver is watching Hulu instead of looking out the window.

Sure, being a safety driver is a boring job, but there are lots of boring jobs that require careful attention, and people manage to do them.

It's not reasonable to expect the general public to reliably monitor their self driving car, but it is very reasonable to expect a professional safety driver in a prototype car to not watch Hulu.

What does having attempted armed robbery have to do with this?

I worked with a convicted first-degree murderer and strangely she was capable of answering phones and filing papers (and she didn’t kill any of us).

Because the job is boring yet safety critical, you need someone who is conscientious. You need someone who follows the rules and tries their best to live up to their responsibilities. Committing an armed robbery is basically the exact opposite of this.

You see the result. It's not that she was looking out the window and zoned out and started daydreaming accidentally. She deliberately made the choice to watch TV on her phone. The car was not legal nor safe to drive without a safety driver monitoring, but she was incapable of providing any monitoring because she was watching TV.

So what about all of the careless, lazy people I’ve worked with over the years who didn’t have armed robbery convictions? Maybe a past crime isn’t a good predictor of future work ability.

I didn’t say “hire everyone who isn’t an armed robber.” I said “don’t hire armed robbers for this job.” Unfortunately past crimes can be good predictors of future work unreliability.

The point remains, the job they’re asking the safety driver to do is incompatible with human attention.

Right, which is why every other company uses two safety drivers so they can cover for eachother when distracted

People do it. It's not necessarily easy, but they do. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Orders_for_Sentries

My first thought was that the other companies don’t use two drivers for an extra set of eyes on the road but to have an extra set of eyes on the driver.

The system should have detected and braked and if was incapable of this it shouldn't be on public roads. This is a very simple case of the car failing to detect an object in the road and should be the most basic functionality of a driverless vehicle. I have sympathy for the driver who Uber's PR team has thrown under the bus (excuse the turn of phrase) when it was obviously was a basic engineering and management failure.

That doesn't stop the fact that you first have to identify that the car will not make an action automatically and by that time it is too late for a human to take manual controls back. That also doesn't stop people who are looking out the window but not really focused on what is going on since they likely spend hundreds of hours looking and nothing ever happens.

Human brains were not designed for this kind of task. Everything about the task prompts a resting mindset but the task requires 100% full concentration for hours.

You and I may disagree on this but my assumption is that it’s not the drivers job to determine whether the car will take the right action, but to do whatever is necessary to prevent any sort of accident.

Regardless my point was more related to the fact that an additional driver likely would have prevented the primary driver from watching a movie on there phone as opposed to watching the road.

Whatever they’re supposed to do in this instance the driver wasn’t doing it.

It’s not really relevant what we think the safety’s job is, but what he thinks Uber thinks his job is. I suspect he suspects Uber wouldn’t keep him employed long if he kept interrupting the car if there might be an accident. And, of course, he’s screwed if there is an accident, too. It’s a shit job they gave to a felon because they needed a warm body in a seat that they could blame or things went south.

Re: second driver, I agree, but that costs twice as much.

Seems pretty obvious who to blame to me.

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