ex-Cruise here. Cruise has an incident response team that trains for this. For a team that hasn't had any real-world accidents yet, they seemed pretty competent. They'll show up ASAP and take care of things.
The cars have a handbook for safety drivers and the case is handled like almost any other accident. This system was put in place following the first accident that occurred near the SF courthouse years ago (safety drivers were hired following that crash).
What happens if there's no safety driver? Remote assistance is there, and the city is not a large place if you have to recover a wayward robot. I am not a lawyer; there will probably be some regulation eventually.
Uber is culpable for designing the job such that the risk of accidents significantly increased.
I do think civil liability is appropriate, and uber Settled for $9.7 Million. (it looks like the family is also suing the city and state.) https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2019/03/19/...
Also, even if she wasn't doing it at uber's request, this is such a predictable event. The driver was paid close to minimum wage... Regardless of how you feel about this, it's definitely the case that people who are paid minimum wage will typically give minimum effort. This was totally forseeable. The people in charge of making this decision at uber were either negligent or willfully ignorant, but there's no excuse to hire someone for near-minimum wage for this job if you truly care about safety.
She was watching The Voice on Hulu.
We know she didn't have to record something every 30 seconds or enter reading from the dashboard or enter something within 10 seconds of a light flashing.
Is this some weird type of disinformation campaign against uber? I don't like uber but it's weird seeing a made up story like this. Only other place I have seen these is in some worker organizing efforts (which I generally support - but the made up stuff can just circulate like crazy).
In swimming pools, you have lifeguards with <30 minutes shifts, overlapping coverage zones, and managers hovering behind them to ensure they do pay attention. On trains, you have dead-man switches that stop the train if the driver isn't paying attention. The military gives pilots amphetamines if they need to stay awake for long hours. Etc.
You just cannot expect a person to stay focused monitoring something for more than couple minutes. You need to have systems to help them and mitigate the unavoidable lapse in focus. At the very least, they should've taken away her phone and made her narrate what she sees on record, while making her aware it will be reviewed and compared against video recordings afterwards.
They set her up to fail, so it's wise to ask what her role really was. Convenient scapegoat, organizational surge circuit breaker, ablative armor - it's a plausible explanation.
It seems reasonable to expect someone to at least not be watching Hulu when they are supposed to be a safety driver. This wasn't a case of "the task was just too hard for a human".
e.g. see https://internetofbusiness.com/uber-safety-driver-watching-v...
Has Uber improved since then? I attended an UberATG recruiting event where they showed a disengagement where they almost hit a little girl after she got off a school bus. (They were showing this because they re-created the scene on their test track and wanted to show they learned something). But in the perception video of the event they showed, you can clearly see there being lidar returns reflected off the school bus mirror, the system clustering them into an object, and the Uber car slowing down for this ghost object. The girl was saved by this false positive, probably not by the safety driver hitting the brakes. Uber does some interesting SDC research, but I would not feel safe being within 100 meters of any of their cars.