In a sense, I want to agree. That was a big no-no on her part.

But ... for a project like this, it's the kind of thing they should have planned for and could have easily worked around.

First of all, Uber's setup was to have one person do both the analytics monitoring and safety roles. That's ridiculous. The safety person needs to focus on that alone.

Second, for any boring job, it's expected that people will tend to mentally check out, and you should design it so that a single checkout doesn't cascade to death. They could have had a periodic "press this button to prove you're paying attention", or limited the employee from bringing any device except a limited one with no distractions.

So yeah, she shouldn't have been watching a movie, but Uber shouldn't have had better safeguards for the inevitable attention drift.