Uber backup driver indicted in 2018 self-driving crash that killed woman

That’s really the fundamental point, these processes exist because those failure cases are understood, acknowledged, and chosen to be managed diligently.

SOYA summer was a lot of fun, though an office job still qualifies for the acronym even if you don’t get a great tan and have a lot less fun, heh.

Blaming the individual would not solve the problem. The question that the parent comment tries to answer is "what do we do so the backup driver does not watch his phone?".

That would save lives. To blame the individual and move on will kill more people in the future.

If you don't expect something to happen reaction times can be really slow.

Which is also how it differs from the lifeguard job, there you always expect that from time to time something will happen, but as far as I can tell many people would not expect this when they use a self-driving car. Because you know, the car is already meant to be able to handle this. Or at least this is how many people think about self driving cars I think.

Safety is about proactively defending against human nature, not blaming people after the fact.

People are condemning this person for being on their phone (and fair enough), but if I am sitting in a comfortable vehicle with nothing to do / read then I will fall asleep soon enough. I think this is quite common.

That said, I don’t think this gets Uber off the hook. If I were on a jury, I’d likely say Uber was guilty of manslaughter (barring a real look at the evidence).

How about starting by simply removing their phone? Isn't that easy? The driver was looking at her phone at the time when she was supposed to be looking at the road. This is a simple violation. The phone should have been banned and the driver fired after a first violation.

I am pretty sure that while what you say might be hard to do for some people, there are individuals out there for whom sitting and looking at the road for hours would not be such a big problem. If she couldn't handle the job, she shouldn't have worked there.

If the plane crashed due to an autopilot error, yes, absolutely.

So yes, in an American court, disabling a proven safety feature is significantly worse than simply purchasing a vehicle without the feature.

The safety driver failed at their job, but the NTSB clearly lays significant blame for that failure on Uber, who should know well that humans are poorly suited to monitoring automated systems, and committed acts and omissions that increased the likelihood of an accident.

This is part of the general attitude that rights and freedoms don't matter if a machine violates them. When you walk out of a store post purchase and the security alarm goes off you have zero obligation to disclose what is now your property to the loss prevention experts. But somehow it's acceptable to assume you're a criminal because a machine said so.

Consider two training courses:

* instructors who are gung-ho on automation being "nearly there" and encouraging people to relax in the car and let the software do its work!

* instructors who are constantly impressing upon students that they need to be vigilant.

One can see how one party is 90% liable. And the other is 10% liable, etc.

The interesting part of this case comes down to the training. In that if it was lacking, it then makes it very clear to future companies that their training needs to be more rigorous.

If my skydive instructor doesn't deploy the backup parachute because I, the student, didn't alert them that the primary chute failed to deploy, it's entirely their fault if we hit the ground at terminal velocity.

If a lifeguard is working at a public pool watching Netflix on their phone and a kid drowns, you can't argue that the kid should have splashed more.

But how do you suppose we create FSD cars if we can't try them out before they are ready? There is just no other way to do it than vigilant drivers that watch what these cars do.

> To put it another way, the self-driving system did not alert the driver that it had detected something

Well of course not, who would expect that? If the car could positively identify the collision before it happened, it would have simply stopped, no need for a driver at all. The driver is there to prevent exactly this kinds of accidents, and this driver failed by getting our her phone and distracting herself with streaming videos instead of doing her one job. Plain and simple.

There would be a different blame calculus if this were a production level 2 system like autopilot. In that case, it's not a paid test pilot, it would be the paid purchaser of a certified aircraft.

However, I don't think it's reasonable at all to expect someone to remain attentive while looking at a self-driving car. This is the same problem train drivers face, which has been mitigated with all sorts of methods, least of which a dead-man switch. Some countries let their train drivers mention every signal they come across to themselves, with Japanese train drivers even pointing at signs to ensure they're paying attention.

This was a vehicle that had been modified to reduce certain safety features (because Uber couldn't get them to work properly) with someone at the wheel expected to be 100% focused on the road while giving them nothing to do at the same time. You can only go through so many hours of sitting in a card doing nothing before you go crazy.

From a revenge-seeking perspective it's easy to blame the one person who could've stopped the car for her obvious disregard for safety (streaming video on the job), and I suppose a criminal justice case might be in order. However, I think Uber should be mainly responsible for the loss of life because their flawed design not only made the car less secure but also completely disregarded the human psychology when they designed how their human safeguard driver should do their job. Even human-operated cars will beep and yell at you if you don't pay attention while you're driving in cruise control, if such safety features were omitted in the self-driving design then clearly the driver was set up to take the fall when something bad would happen.

I strongly believe Uber only put that woman in there because local law wouldn't let them test their car without a human at the wheel, not because they wanted to ensure their car didn't kill anyone.

No, the last articles and discussions were quite clear that this accident wouldn't have happened with a real driver. The road conditions were good, the visibility was good. A driver would have seen the woman crossing the road well enough and slow down.

Humans are very bad at paying attention for a rare event and having nothing else to do 99.999% of the rest of the time. This is surely well known to the people who set up this system in the self driving car.

The vehicle was travelling 20mph faster than it's own "safe clear ahead" zone allowed for. Simply ignoring it's own safety limits and travelling at a higher rate of speed is a design flaw.

Designing a large public road autonomous vehicle test and not taking into account an easily predicted human vulnerability that's been known in other automation experiments for decades is a project design flaw.

Whether or not the driver is at some fault, I think the court will be capable of determining that. Arizona's willingness to completely disregard the mountains of negligence on part of a giant corporation is disturbing.

> I can't see how this is not clear cut negligence.

1) The driver is a woman.

2) While I think the driver does bear some fault here, they don't bear all the fault. Uber designed an unsafe system that relied on an unnatural amount of vigilance from a single person while simultaneously discouraging that vigilance [1]. They didn't design the car to shut down when one of it's critical safety components (the driver) was not operating correctly, and they didn't even give that driver amphetamines or something to increase their vigilance to artificial levels.

[1] Basically: pay close attention to a boring process while doing absolutely nothing for hours on end. I'm pretty sure that's a classic "humans suck at this" task.

It's unreasonable to hold someone accountable for a "self-driving car" that suddenly decides at a split-seconds notice that it can't cope driving.

Of course this is extra bad because it's an experimental car, but it's the same in my opinion with those Teslas on the road now that do the same thing.

> "Had the vehicle operator been attentive, she would likely have had sufficient time to detect and react to the crossing pedestrian to avoid the crash or mitigate the impact," the November 2019 NTSB report stated.

This isn’t a case of the Uber performing some split-second error that needed immediate correction then blaming the driver when that didn’t happen, the way so many in this thread seem to want to make it out to be. This is a person whose job it was to watch the road watching Hulu instead and as a result failing to react to developing conditions that, if NTSB is to be believed (and I trust them a whole lot more than the randos commenting here), could have easily been prevented by an attentive driver.

Uber should absolutely get the blame for creating this situation in the first place; letting a self-driving car out with only a backup driver as safety, and with her phone on her to boot, should not even be allowed.

The Uber software can detect an imminent collision but relies on the backup driver to act on it. For everything else the car is designed to drive itself. This is why "automation complacency" should not be ignored.

But will more people end up dead than in the scenario where we had no ‘self-driving’ cars at all?

Humans are much more accident prone than robots in all the research on this I’ve seen.

It remains to be seen if a automated drivers can make-up for increased risk in such scenarios with good performance in areas they excel, such as reaction time, highly distributive attention, near perfect physical predictions and decisions made on that basis, vehicle-to-vehicle coordination and vehicle to road communication etc.

What is clear though is that any practical system in the near term (non-general AI) will approach driving quite differently than a human driver. Hence the jury is still out of lidar vs camera-only approaches (Waymo vs Tesla).

Not to victim blame but if they were not wearing lights or a reflective vest I think a human could have made the same tragic error.

As you point out the system actually DID detect them.

Auto and truck drivers operating normal vehicles are in a state of at least partial task concentration while operating their vehicles. The task concentration context in which this test driver was seated was completely unlike that of a normal vehicle driver.

This isn't a binary. They can also choose to stop the public test of a vehicle they can't adequately control.

The accident would just never have gotten the scrutiny it did. Unless the driver came out and mentioned they were using their phone, the whole incident would have just vanished. They certainly wouldn't have bothered getting a subpoena to check the drivers cell record.

Also, consumers can't be trusted to pick the safest cars. Most consumers choose on price, not safety features.

But at the end of the day, we all share the road together, so the government will regulate some minimum safety level that all cars must comply with in addition to civil liabilities.

Consumers don’t have any real information on the risk between a Waymo or a Tesla. So they aren’t in a position to mitigate.

Further, you’d incentive the car companies to cut corners since someone else would pay for it.

We don’t even need a new legal framework for it. We could just apply products liability law.

Not saying it's right, but that's how the law currently works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

The number on a sign is just that, a number. Sure you can use it in the absence of all else but it should be tossed if there's any other information to use.

Self driving cars should be going as fast as whatever is normal for the rest of the traffic in those conditions and at that time. Creeping along at 55mph in the right line while 75mph traffic dodges you is anything but safe. Safety is achieved through homogeneous traffic flow and in practice that means not having a minority of traffic that's going very fast nor very slow nor a bimodal distribution.

Modern civil engineering doctrine is to set the speed limit based on traffic speed and to control the traffic speed with the road design/features so "but the law" holds about as much water as a net if the goal is safety.

That said, the court cares about the letter of the law (as it should) so your proposed defense may in fact be beneficial.

Edit: Whether I care matters not.