But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.
Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.
I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.
The court itself said taking the nearby exit would have allowed him to drop them off at a safe location. Yes, they could have injured themselves after that, but it's not the same.
You can’t dump your passengers on the freeway, for any reason. It’s not safe for them or for the other drivers on the road.
What’s not in question is that the two women were extremely intoxicated to the point of vomiting on themselves. The PDF alleges that one of the women shouted that there was an emergency, which is what originally caused the driver to pull over where he did.
It’s still not clear to me how much of this was the driver forcing them out and leaving them, and how much was they got out, refused to pay the cleaning fee, and so he just left them.
We aren’t getting clear views of what happened at all from the two people left alive.
If somebody needed help, the driver may very well have to decided to stop ASAP, at the same gore point, and the women could have then chosen to immediately get out, and one of them would have gotten killed. Literally nothing would have changed.
Indeed, it sounds like one of the women was shouting there was an emergency, so the driver stopped. That is effectively "I need help". What would your button do any differently?
My point is: where do we draw the line? Intoxicated people are going to act irrationally and at what point does “low paid person who shuttles people from point A to point B” become responsible for the actions of their riders?
It’s still unclear how much of this was “forced out of the car” and “got out to argue and refused to get back in”, the timeline of events is incredibly muddy (as the linked PDF agrees) and having dealt with very intoxicated people I can easily imagine the challenges the driver (who doesn’t appear to speak English well or at all given they needed a translator in the arbitration) faced dealing with 2 drunk and irrational passengers.
Let me be crystal clear, I don’t at all think “oh well, someone died”. But attacking the driver isn’t going to fix the system that caused this.
I question the $20M, but I have no problem at all with finding fault.
I’ve had personal experience dealing with drunk people in my car, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how you would get to this point. And that was with drunk people I knew, and mostly liked, not strangers. Drunk people do not normally act logically, especially if they are to the point of throwing up on themselves due to their level of intoxication.
So in my mind the driver was at fault criminal negligence, but when the driver can be any untrained pleb with a phone, the company assumes the risk and should be held liable.
What if that's what you want?
Why should we be pressuring corporate middlemen to be regulators and law enforcement? They're not only bad at it and in no position to do it well, their attempts do more harm than good.
How is a corporation supposed to "vet" drivers? The only plausible tools they have are things like background checks. So now you have someone who is only trying to put food on the table getting excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly because they have an unrelated drug conviction from when they were 19 years old. Meanwhile the same thing happens in the case in question because that driver can pass the background check.
Whereas if you put the liability on the driver, i.e. the person who is actually there and making the decision, then losing their fancy new car and maybe going to jail provides the right incentive to not dump people in a dangerous place, to the person who is actually choosing to do it.
The platform enables anyone to interact with clients having minimal training except a drivers license. They are operating as agents of the corporation just classified as adjunct “gig workers.” Read: a loop hole to abdicate responsibility and blame the workers while the company makes money on them with minimal overhead.
Imagine an app where anyone could be an underpaid nurse, and said nurse poisons a patient with fentanyl. Who’s to blame then? The company for lack of oversight or the nurse? Or both?
Wait until you hear about the companies operating a telephone network that lets anyone call or text each other.
> They are operating as agents of the corporation
So if the local library has a jobs board and you post a listing there, are you now an agent of the library and they should be responsible for everything you do?
What about the Post Office or FedEx? Should you be able to sue them if someone ships you defective goods?
> Imagine an app where anyone could be an underpaid nurse, and said nurse poisons a patient with fentanyl. Who’s to blame then?
Obviously the nurse. Why should it be someone other than the person who did it?
The “facts” of this event are highly contested and not at all clear. I’m not saying what I typed above is what happened, but it’s just as likely as the other scenarios presented. The linked PDF acknowledges this and presents a few of the conflicting statements made by the surviving passenger and the driver.
*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]
Are you seriously pretending the driver doesn't have agency here? This accident was easily preventable by the safety driver, which makes the "fall guy" characterization misleading. Sure, maybe there was some risk of complacency, but what's the alternative? Should uber have gone full workplace surveillance and have a camera trained on the safety driver's face, to make sure she was paying attention?
And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.
You're conveniently omitting the fact it's a self driving car prototype and that the safety driver is supposed to catch failures.
The driverless car that very much had a safety driver, which got distracted because she was watching TV shows on her phone?
The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
You should in fact not be allowed to do something dangerous, but say you were not liable because the danger was someone else's responsibility. No! The danger was your responsibility, no matter who you hire to manage it!
I don't see how that's a relevant point less those safety devices are mandatory. If my windshield broke, I was too lazy to fix it, and that resulted in auto-braking not working, then I was involved in an accident that could have been stopped with auto-braking, should I get extra flak because I didn't have auto-braking, even though it's not mandated?
>The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
The OP was talking about criminal responsibility. Obviously they should be responsible in civil court and pay damages, same as if UPS had one of its drivers crash into some kid. But should they be criminally responsible?
Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.
> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".
On the driverless cars, the chances are that the companies would come up with some innovative legal clause to add to their terms and services to avoid taking any liability from the driverless car's action.
You think they don't?
Being responsible for some one else's safety should have a higher bar than being responsible for your own safety.
I cannot claim to have done the onboarding process myself, tried to look up online and the most I could find is that a good amount of time is spend on doing background checks. I was able to find Uber's employee onboarding information for their corporate employees and it turns out that there is indeed some training required for people who are managing your corporate property. Ironically I do not see any mandatory (ideally paid for) training provided by Uber to drivers when they are handling other human beings (passengers). And to be fair its hard to predict everything, mistakes happen unfortunately, the goal should always be to get to a better state than where we are as of today.
A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.
And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.
They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.
Is it, though? If there is no driver to blame, then liability lies solely with Uber (or Waymo, as the case may be). I am not sure that that is a win from their PoV.
To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.
Every other answer is bullshit.
No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.
I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Is it, though?
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
I'm fairly sure, if it's something mechanical and a human can do it, the computers won't be far behind. But even if not, we can redesign the vehicles to make it easier for a computer, eg we can make all axes or even all wheels independently steerable and control their velocity individually. A human would be overwhelmed with that, they can barely keep hold of a steering wheel, but a computer wouldn't mind too much.
Yes I considered independent wheels but a basic trailer is $3k, which doesn't leave much room for anything complicated.
The point is there's a million of these edge cases for which autonomy will not economically compete for another hundred years.
> The point is there's a million of these edge cases for which autonomy will not economically compete for another hundred years.
My prediction: anything a human can do by just manipulating the controls of the car (steering wheel, gas, breaks) will be automated fairly quickly. Especially stuff like parking maneuvers (I assume that's what you describe?), because those happen at low speeds and mostly involve fixed non-moving obstacles. And it's pretty easy to generate training data. When the autonomous system attempts these edge cases, they can simulate a myriad attempts with the on-board computer. There's not a lot of physics going on at low speeds. (Or rather, pretty simple approximations are enough.)
The harder parts are dealing with moving and ambiguous objects (pedestrians, other cars, cyclists etc) at speed. But the industry is well aware of that.
About what will take longer: at the moment a truck driver provides a lot of incidental labour around the truck. Like helping with loading and unloading, minor repairs, etc.
If you have no person on board, you need to redesign how the industry is organised. If you need human help to unload at the destination, you need to preposition a human there, you can't rely on the truck coming with a human.
I'd like to see cars with better autonomy features but theyre still far too expensive and non standardized. When the computer breaks or needs an upgrade the whole car is junked. The purchase data shows people aren't asking for autonomy.
Huh, what? Cars are getting better and better and last longer; that's why the average age of a car on the road keeps climbing.
Where I lived the average car has been about the same age for a few decades now. They are all really new.
> The logo of shopping lines is painted on containers because they own them.
Only some of the have a logo painted on them. (I happen to live within a five minute walk to a container port in Singapore.)
> I'd like to see cars with better autonomy features but theyre still far too expensive and non standardized.
Yes, this will get better.