That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.
It absolutely makes sense to put a human in a car you're testing and don't have full confidence in yet but are sending into real traffic. Not doing so would be ludicrously negligent. However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. The ability of monks to concentrate on a single thought for hours is correctly seen as very, very difficult. There's no way any regular person could deal well with a scenario like "sometime in the next 8 hours, you may or may not need to smash this brake pedal with a second's notice, but other than that you have no task." That's one of the things that most worries me about "almost there" systems like Tesla's.
That said, if you've decided to attempt this anyway, checking your phone is definitely not okay.
I like the idea, and if these pruned false positives are rare enough I think it would be a great safety measure - you could even have the driver verbally label things, which might have both training (in the AI sense) and awareness (for the humans) benefits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling).
Note that "rare enough" needn't be all that rare, just that if it is multiple every second or something it clearly wouldn't be practical.
> I like the idea
I'm not sure how well I would respond to a sudden alarm when everything has been deemed safe until a moment ago. I'd potentially need several seconds to figure out what is going on.
I would hazard a guess that an approach that might be more fruitful be to have a meter that dynamically adjusts the "riskiness" of the situation between a yellow, orange, and red zone, so that the driver (a) has to pay attention constantly, (b) gets information constantly, and hence (c) has a better chance to react earlier. I know if I see a "danger meter" getting into the orange zone, I'm not going to wait until it goes into the red before I start paying attention.
I want the driver paying attention constantly, but I want them paying attention to the environment, not a meter. A periodic "things are unusually interesting, what's going on?" query seems like a way to motivate that. But any actual attempt at a solution should be validated in testing...
What I suggested there isn't really a deadman's switch ("stop if no one is around to do task x"), but something to periodically, randomly check the driver's attentiveness, and can raise a red flag if they take too long to respond.
A deadman's switch is different and enforces "do X if person Y stops doing this thing at this predictable interval" -- not what I was proposing.
And anyone who's achieved this ability is unlikely to be willing to be hired as 1099 contractor for whatever low pay is being offered.
Then give them a task! Install a HUD drawing a box in real time with the classification of nearest detected object (bike, pedestrian, car, mailbox) and put buttons in the wheel for the driver to confirm/reject the classification. This way:
a) you improve your machine learning
b) driver has wheels on the road
c) driver has hands on the wheel
d) driver is focused on incoming objects
This was researched in the context of security guards, who had a 95% missrate after just 20 minutes on the job.
It is entirely unreasonable to expect a human supervise to detect and correct this type of situation in time.
To expect full attention from a person that is not supposed to have anything to do for hours on end (different from driving, which requires constant inputs and adjustments) is not something that's compatible with humans.
With that said they were looking at their phone instead of zoning out eyes front.
I wish articles about this crash would continue to hammer on the basics, to keep front¢er this crash was completely avoidable.
Even if there were no technical issues,
(1) the driver was on her phone before and during the crash. The whole reason for the driver to be present is to intervene in a situation like this.
(2) the car was driving too fast for conditions. Nobody should drive this fast in the middle of the city in the middle of night. It doesn't look like the car could have come to any kind emergency stop. Self-driving cars should drive more carefully than humans, not push against and over the speed limit regardless of outside conditions.