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.
Also ex-Cruise here. Yes there have been accidents, and there are accidents every month or so-- just check the public DMV reports. A lot are minor, like other cars knocking the radars off the front of the car back when Cruise cars had radars that stuck out awkwardly. Some were worse though-- I've seen one where airbags deployed in the other car (other car was going very fast and rear-ended the AV). Cruise has not had an UberATG / Elain Herzberg -magnitude accident, though.
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.
Except nobody with a sane mind would consider this an acceptable safety system. It's widely known humans are not capable of performing this job. Period. Everywhere else, where there's a need for long stretches of uninterrupted human focus, you have systems on top of systems ensuring this happens.
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.
You just cannot expect a person to stay focused monitoring something for more than couple minutes.
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".
The lidar saw Herzberg 6 seconds before impact, and there are news stories detailing email evidence that Meyhofer and others at UberATG intentionally made the perception system filter sparse lidar returns at the time (likely because they were having difficulty with trees). Today, Meyhofer and others have vested tens of millions in stock following the Softbank investment. While the safety driver was a factor in the crash, there is a gross amount of greed that was also a factor.
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.
Uber should have just put two people in the car and taken their phones for the duration of the shift. Totally foreseeable in hindsight which is awful considering someone died.
She wasn't looking at the road because she was entering data about the drive into the uber app, at uber's request.
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 wasn't "entering data about the drive into the uber app, at uber's request". She was streaming the The Voice on Hulu.
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).
How do you know she didn't have to record something every 30 seconds? What if Uber told her not to? Maybe she had to enter in readings from the dashboard? How about if the data needed to be entered within 10 seconds of a light flashing? Etc...
Don't let the facts get in the way of the outrage machine!
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.
