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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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