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Comment by finnthehuman | Hacker News Reader

>Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver.

It was well known all along that humans are poorly equipped to remain actively engaged in situations that require split-second reactions, while exerting zero effort or control for hours on end.

Air traffic is as safe as it is because the accident analysis always pushes past "pilot error" as the root cause. If one pilot can make the error, why won't another? Did the system set them up to fail? Even if it didn't, could the system be enhanced such that the failure (or class of failures) could be prevented?

In the case of the human in Uber's self-driving car, they were set up for failure. And in such a well known way that makes any claim Uber was not negligent very hard to defend.

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As far as Uber being negligent for putting an easily-distracted human in charge of a car that ostensibly (even if they claim otherwise) needs little attention, I totally agree they are negligent. The reason for that is I believe it's unreasonable to expect a human driver to pay 100% attention to the road while in a car that only requires 5% attention to the road. However, I also believe as well as telling the driver "pay attention to the road 100% of the time" she would have been told "Do not use your phone while driving" which I believe is a totally reasonable request and expectation. With this assumption and if the blame has to fall on only a single party then I think this news puts it squarely on the driver.

Aren't they required to use their phones to record diagnostic data? It's a small step from there to messing around on the phone.

What? Why don't they have their hands on the fucking steering wheel?

They didn't want to pay to have two people in the car anymore.

No, of course not. They have to pay attention as a driver. The car does all the diagnostic recordings.

That's false though. http://theconversation.com/preliminary-report-on-ubers-drive...

> According to Uber, the developmental self-driving system relies on an attentive operator to intervene if the system fails to perform appropriately during testing. In addition, the operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review.

> However, I also believe as well as telling the driver "pay attention to the road 100% of the time" she would have been told "Do not use your phone while driving" which I believe is a totally reasonable request and expectation.

I think if you are going to pay someone near minimum wage and let them hold onto their phone while in the car, you know they are likely to use it. Even if the request is reasonable, you know minimum wage workers are going to do that sort of thing if not monitored via an in-car camera directed at the driver's seat.

You could pay me an absurd amount of money, I'm still going get distracted.

I believe all other driveless tests work the same way, with sensors but requiring human driver at all time. Would you also consider Waymo, Cruise, et al, negligent?

The technologies are not ready. They are being tested. Aircraft get to such a safe state like today after so many iterations and improvement, both in technology and process.

A terrible tragedy happened in this case. Hopefully it will help save a lot of lives in future.

> Would you also consider Waymo, Cruise, et al, negligent?

Absolutely. We know from centuries of evidence that humans are profoundly bad at monitoring 'mostly autonomous' systems. Waymo/Uber know this as well, they just employ the driver as a convenient way to offload legal liability while they test unproven and unsafe technology on the public without consent.

There is a difference between putting technology out there that is "not ready" and putting technology on the road that fundamentally doesn't do the basic things that a car must do, such as brake for pedestrians. It's an unfortunate but avoidable tragedy if a self-driving system fails due to a computer bug. Here, Uber disabled the self-driving system's emergency braking function: http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-nts.... As far as I know, Waymo at least is at least theoretically capable of braking for a pedestrian in autonomous mode.

The overwhelming majority of vehicles on the road today don't break for pedestrians. Just a few models of cars sold in the past few years have features to automatically engage braking.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/where-automakers-...

If these technologies, as you say, are not ready (I think you are right), what are they doing on public roadways?

The main issue is that one can't really consider the technology ready for real world testing until said real world testing is done.

That's obviously not true. Real-world testing should be the last phase, after the car has succeeded at simulations. They're building a mock urban environment near my home for just this purpose.

Tests by definition can be failed. If you couldn't fail, then what's the point?

You can pass all the prerequisites, but none of that guarantees that it doesn't fail at the real world testing phase.

All that said, in this specific case, Uber absolutely hadn't passed all the prerequisites and shouldn't have been given any permission to be on real streets.

Well, what you're calling "passing the prerequisites" is no different than "being ready." It's the same as medicine testing; they don't go straight to giving the drug to patients.

Waymo seem to have gone to quite some effort to make the failure modes of their tech as benign as possible, preferring to stop the car and make the safety driver take control rather than risking it and hoping they'll step in. They may also have safety drivers that are simply a lot more engaged in actively monitoring what the car is doing even when it's not doing anything that requires them to intervene, based on the reporting I've seen lately.

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