That’s really the fundamental point, these processes exist because those failure cases are understood, acknowledged, and chosen to be managed diligently.
SOYA summer was a lot of fun, though an office job still qualifies for the acronym even if you don’t get a great tan and have a lot less fun, heh.
Blaming the individual would not solve the problem. The question that the parent comment tries to answer is "what do we do so the backup driver does not watch his phone?".
That would save lives. To blame the individual and move on will kill more people in the future.
Do self-driving cars which need a always very fast available backup driver make sense?
I don't think "this is a clearly a development phase" means anything when there's no guarantee self-driving cars will actually reduce deaths. It may be that the way forward is simply more advanced driver assist technology that better accounts for human psychology, and not fully autonomous cars. All these sacrifices for a future of autonomous driving may simply be a waste.
Personally, I don't think these cars should be on public roads until they get a lot better. We're just introducing a new class of accidents; human drivers generally make the same kinds of errors and other drivers can reason about what they're thinking. Computers are more likely to fail in (to humans) surprising and bizarre ways. What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
As an aside, if we really wanted to do something, I suspect the easiest way to save thousands of lives a year right now would be to implement mandatory functionality on all smartphones to shut off the screen when the phone is moving faster than 5mph. This would inconvenience people and passengers would be annoyed, but there was, after all, a time before smartphones.
I like this idea
Maybe need to figure out how to avoid shutting down the passengers' phones?
Yes, but the legal entity behind the driving of the car needs to be hold legal liable. (i.e. the AI provider)
Hand over to driver can be required but the driver needs to have reasonable time to adapt to the situation (multiple seconds).
Only with this can we make sure that companies providing driving AIs give their best to make sure they don't kill.
Else they will have just pressure to improve it to a point where it happens rarely and then stop there because its not worth the development cost.
As ever, perfect is the enemy of good. Are there currently zero fatalities on the roads because cars are 100% safe? Or have they been developed to an acceptable standard of safety?
But we need to set initiatives in a way that manufacturers will be improving over time. They won't do it out of goodness of their hart, and quite possible marketing and good PR will be more impactfull on sale than 0.5% safer AI
I have 0 trust that market itself will solve this issue.
We just would need to make it clear from the get to go that after that grace period the law will be strict even for cars sold before ;=)
I have even less faith for politicians to not extend grace periods in face of organized backslash(probably paid and bought by companies themself), making them infinite.
Of course. Otherwise you could just always hand over a few milliseconds before any impact and blame the driver.
We should do the same thing we do to stop regular drivers watching their phones.
Despite being a huge legal and moral issue, a large minority of normal drivers can and do watch their phone while driving.
Isn't this basic security guard job description? Fire lookout spotters, etc? It's totally realistic. Sit there, pay attention, and be ready to take action if needed.
For higher security sites this is solved by having several rovers in constant communication and coordinatation with the (often multiple) people sitting by the cameras. So both the rovers and the desk are constantly doing not just sitting.
Fire watch is the same thing. Your not just up in your tower eyes constantly peeled on the forrest, ready to react in milliseconds.
I’m not saying it is realistic to expect the driver to be attentive the whole trip, but watching a video on a phone is just gross negligence.
Watching something while doing nothing is a job that has been around for a long time. If you’re employed to do that job, you cannot watch a video on your phone, especially when a failure kills someone. The whole reason you’re hired to watch a thing is to prevent that from happening.
Comparing it to the lifeguards discussions above: you wouldn’t allow phone usages as a lifeguard either.
And note that watching and ensuring are not doing something, they are precisely doing nothing. Most, if not all, human beings are not very good at paying attention while doing nothing which is what Uber is requiring of their test 'drivers'.
This makes sense if the objective is to reduce fatalities. Unfortunately it makes no sense if the objective is to merely reduce the cost of operating commercial vehicles by eliminating the need to employ a driver - which is where the money is.
The fact that we cannot countenance something like this in the current world is testament to the power our devices have on us.
Also, all of these jobs would be done in relatively short shifts.
Note that I'm not saying that the scape gal wasn't grossly negligent in watching a video on her phone. I'm saying that Uber was also negligent in making their safety system just be 1 person sitting there, expected to react in milliseconds.
You don't accidentally start watching a video on your phone.
You make the human drive the car. The robot can jump in and slam the brakes when the human makes a mistake. That is the safe option.
But it just won't sell. Nobody here would buy a car that prevents the driver from making mistakes. Autodrive car that obeys speed limits while allowing driver facebook on phone: acceptable. Car that doesn't allow the human driver to speed or run red lights: market kryptonite.
> Nobody here would buy a car that prevents the driver from making mistakes.
Almost every new car today comes with adaptive cruise control, autonomous lane-keeping, augmented backup cameras, lane-change and backup alarms, etc. I don't see why a better version wouldn't sell just as well.
There was another interesting proposal: Lights/sirens that automatically turn on when the police/ambulance/firetruck breaks the speed limit. Again, no takers.
But would you buy a car that hits the brakes at the speed limit? Not an alert. An actual limiter that you cannot bypass.
There are plenty of valid reasons to speed:
* (Most common) The actual speed limit is way too slow for what the road conditions are, and everyone would suffer if they followed it
* You are trying to overtake a truck and avoid their blind spot (I have done this; the less time spent next to a truck, the less anxiety you feel)
* An emergency vehicle is behind you and you need to speed up to overtake a car in the other lane so you can lane-change and make way for the vehicle (State v. Brown)
* Everyone around you is speeding; going slower is more dangerous because people need to lane change to get around you
* You are trying to make some space between some kind of maniac driver who you believe will soon lose control and hit you (I have done this to get away from drunk drivers)
* Your loved one is experiencing a medical emergency and you need to get to the hospital
* You are being chased by some kind of criminal or terrorist
* You are avoiding a natural disaster such as a rockslide, tornado, flood, or avalanche
Realistically, will you ever be driving away from a rockslide or sedan terrorist? Probably not, but with a regular car, you at least have options to exercise if you ever are in that spot; with a limiter those opportunities are gone.
In the case of a limiter, a mis-configured or broken speedometer or sensor can give false readings that severely inhibit your driving, even while driving, which could cause an accident if your vehicle slams the brakes without warning. It could also prevent you from using highways if your vehicle is not capable of accelerating past 40mph. This is the same argument against self driving cars; humans want control to keep themselves safe, not so they can be dangerous.
Yes those things can happen, however the car can allow the driver to go say 15 km/h faster, doesn't need to slow down at +0.01 above the limits.
Some people frequently go 30 km too fast... On 30 km roads in areas with children
This is not how labor laws work. The role description needs to be fair. A employer cannot just shift all the blame to the employee. The employer needs to take the needed actions and provide the needed equipment and procedures so the employee can do her task.
But, let's see what the result of the trial is. I am not an expert and the trial will clarify this point.
"Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk decided in March 2019 that Uber itself had not committed a crime in Herzberg's death."
Labor laws are irrelevant. They were grossly negligent in operating a vehicle, which is the domain of criminal, not labor, law.
Principal-agent aspects of criminal law may also provide liability for the employer, though apparently they haven't been charged. Which, to the extent they could be, is unfortunate because it is only employer liability, civil and/or criminal, that is likely to substantively effect the likelihood of recurrence, because while the individual is absolutely culpable, it's not the kind of behavior where individual criminal liability is likely to be an effective deterrent without better employer supervision, which won't happen unless she employer has a reason to pay for that cost.
I see e.g. cruise and waymo SDVs around SF with only one person on board. What of those?
My very layperson protocol would be "watch the road while the car is in motion, only use tablet when car is safely parked". My understanding is that SDVs store all the data it collects, so I see no reason to require operating a tablet while the vehicle is in motion. Correct me if I'm wrong.
SF is also an easier place to be watching an SDV in the sense that there's more happening to keep your mind occupied (weird intersections, construction, people doing stupid things). It's a lot easier to lose focus when you're watching a car drive itself around deserted highways in the middle of the night.
I can't say much about what their actual protocols are supposed to be, I can only offer my personal anecdata. I do occasionally see cruise cars around the Japan Town area with only one person in the car. They often park at the safeway across geary. The waymo cars, I see them roaming around closer to downtown, also with single driver, though they don't seem to concentrate in any particular area that I can tell. I also occasionally see unbranded SDVs, sometimes w/ two people, sometimes w/ one. Not sure which company those are from.
> SF is also an easier place to be watching an SDV
Well, from a regulatory perspective, one shouldn't be able to get away with saying "well I was not in a crowded area to keep me attentive, that's why the accident happened". I'd even argue that if the job involves looking at a tablet while the car is motion, then being in a crowded area would make things _more_ dangerous.
The last PR piece seems to omit that. Next piece maybe we will find out the driver was watching hulu on their phone on their lap... while reclassifying objects on the AI tablet also on their lap.
Because if the status quo is to poke at tablets in moving vehicles, how is anyone ok w/ cruise/waymo/whatever cars driving around SF?
California DMV has shown a lot better oversight of self-driving than Arizona. They had deregistered several Uber owned vehicles in 2016 [1], and have some reasonably specific rules. It's much more OK in SF than AZ.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/22/uber_selfdriving_cars...
Extreme case: Your employer tells you to stay alert in a super-boring job for 8 straight hours or else a person can die or whatever. But that may be an impossibility due to how our brain works.
I'd like to know how many hours was he sitting there and how often did he have to intervene that day /week /month. Uber, maybe, should have had another one checking now and then on drivers. Say one for 10 drivers...
But if you mean watching a TV show to distract themselves then not in a million years.
Uber's training or setup may well prove to be negligent... but this employee took the active, conscious step of watching a TV show on her phone when her entire job was to supervise the car's driving and safety of others.
If that's not criminal negligence, I really don't know what is.
I think the TSA also keeps scanners on their toes by digitally placing contraband in the bag pictures at various intervals to make sure the scanner is able to stay engaged (and maybe to get some metrics on hit/miss rates). Maybe these supervised self driving cars need to project a deer jumping into the road and log the driver's response or something.
Edit: there was another post by [redacted] but it disappeared, it does not even show as deleted, weird.
It said: "This isn't some ride along in a consumer grade EV. They were gathering data to program the car with. The emergency braking systems were not active. The person that was supposed to be monitoring the vehicle knew this."
It would probably be more respectful not to copy what they posted along with their username. Actually, I think we'd better redact the username from your quote. People sometimes have important personal reasons for deleting things. The odds aren't high that it matters but the impact could be high if it did.
People sometimes have important personal reasons for deleting things but this does not mean anything. It is not as if "x posted y on twitter and deleted it afterwards" or "the page was edited/deleted, here is an archive.org link" is uncommon on HN, nor it is as if a stalker would not be able to scrap HN posts of someone instantly as they were posted.
> it disappears.
In my experience they show as [deleted] but I guess this is only for posts that have replies.
I'm sure it wasn't that big a deal and I'm sure your intentions were good, but I'm also pretty sure most HN users would want us to protect them in this way, if only for the rare occasion on which it actually is a big deal.
Kind of. Technically, posts that have replies can't be deleted, so what sometimes happens is the poster edits their post and replaces all the text with "[deleted]".
Which should also be prohibited, because it's just as destructive. You shouldn't be able to edit a post with replies either.
Yes, ideally I would just do more revising before posting a comment the first time, but I don't seem to work that way.
I think the two-hour window is a good compromise, and if anything I really wish it was longer. Yes it has downsides, but I really think they're outweighed by the good.
Maybe this is the key.
The control is one thing, but manager can prevent you to look at phone and manager is creating interruption from monotony. The rotation is necessary to deal with human hardware which requires breaks (and moving car requries faster responses then drowning person).
The overlapping zones deal with fact that breaks and manager being present is still not enough.
I really don't understand this assertion.
Having to babysit auto-driving cars in their development phase is well within the realm of what humans are capable of.
The driver booted Netflix, navigated to an episode, and watched in on their phone for the same reason anyone would do it at work: not because they were driven to a boredom so intense that it was the only way to get a grip but because they simply thought "what harm could it do?"
These replies acting like a slightly boring job is doomed to this outcome remind me of those ridiculous articles that stereotype millennials as 30yo-children so spoiled that they're unwilling to do the simplest of jobs. "Millennials refuse to be trash collectors and don't understand how someone could do it. 'Humans aren't made to pick up trash,' John, 32 years old, told our newscaster. 'Else we would have tongs for hands! I don't even think it's possible.'"
Which is not to mention that these workers have ridiculously weak motivations. They create nothing, spending hundreds of hours merely testing out someone else's work. They exist in a field with very little upward mobility, since they are effectively the only non-skilled labor at their companies. Even if there were upward mobility, they work in a field where their job is to help eliminate their job. The only thing offsetting that is that the pay is slightly better than equivalent options.
I can understand why people lose attention driving these cars around.
The argument is that no, it is not, even if you never open netflix you will loose attention. Rhat does not make Netflix ok. But this driver having netflix open does not imply that people without netflix wont loose attention. They will.
Your second paragraph is both strawman and nonsense. Before millenials, people were not able to hold attention while nothing was happening. Which is why train drivers have protocols to prevent loss of attention and so do lifeguards.
The whole "if you admit common human limitation out loud yoi are weak and spoiled is either arrogance or manipulative argument.
But they could watch the road instead of watching their phones. It would be a pretty simple fix- have the backup driver keep their phone in the back of the car. I've had jobs where we had to lock our phones in lockers at the start of our shift, it's not uncommon.
Also, disagree that moving car requires faster responses than drowning person- kids often gently slip under the water in an instant and it's generally quiet and fast, never a big splash or dog paddling "help me!" commotion like in the movies. And longer without oxygen to the brain can lead to more permanent brain death, so I'd say both activities require equal vigilance.
Sure, but that is just baindaid for one instance of problem. Something that allows management to pretend they dealt with it, while not actually trying to solve the problem. Typical human will likely start daydream without the phone or otherwise loose attention.
> Also, disagree that moving car requires faster responses than drowning person- kids often gently slip under the water in an instant and it's generally quiet and fast, never a big splash or dog paddling "help me!" commotion like in the movies. And longer without oxygen to the brain can lead to more permanent brain death, so I'd say both activities require equal vigilance.
That does not require split second attention and quick reflexive reaction. The permanent brain damage does not happen because kid was under water for 5 seconds, car crash can happen under one second.
I mean, a first step is to hold the driver criminally negligent if they get into an accident. Which already happens. That's what legal punishment is for -- to deter extremely dangerous/harmful/etc. behaviors.
But because people often think "it'll never happen to me", that's why companies generally have supervision and spot checks of employees, to try to catch bad behavior and reprimand/fire them first, before it results in damage/death.
Which, if I were Uber, would probably mean installing fish-eye cameras in the corner of each vehicle that would regularly be spot-checked to see if backup drivers were, in fact, not doing their job.
This isn't a particularly difficult problem. And I don't think privacy is a particular issue here.
Punishing the culpable lapse by the individual is necessary but not sufficient. It should have been monitored and supervises by the employer, and failing that is also a culpable lapse which should be punished.
This is a solved problem: you fit the experimental car with an interior camera aimed at the driver. If the backup driver is observed to be distracted by the interior camera, the car can sound a warning for the driver to be alert and if they ignore the warning, the car's hazard lights would come on and it would be slowly brought to a halt.
You send this person to prison for negligent homicide, which I think she is guilty of, and remind backup drivers in the future they're still responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle.
To imply that the individual has no culpability for watching a video on her phone while the vehicle she's in charge of runs down and kills a homeless woman is insanity.
Safety is about proactively defending against human nature, not blaming people after the fact.
If you don't expect something to happen reaction times can be really slow.
Which is also how it differs from the lifeguard job, there you always expect that from time to time something will happen, but as far as I can tell many people would not expect this when they use a self-driving car. Because you know, the car is already meant to be able to handle this. Or at least this is how many people think about self driving cars I think.