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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

This story has all the key elements that come up in discussions around autonomous vehicles (thankfully omitting that inane trolley problem). To me, it is a preview of what is likely happen when adoption is at scale.

The "driver" (or rather "liability scapegoat") will bear the responsibility when things go wrong -- simply because auto makers or service operators have more legal resources than an individual.

Any person left to "monitor" the vehicle will not be paying attention most of the time. Even a conscientious, mindful and diligent person will tune out sooner or later; the task at hand is almost perfectly tailored to make you drift off. Maybe we can look to train engineers to see how that problem is tackled?

Further development to improve the self-driving capabilities of vehicles is likely to plateau at some arbitrary milestone, because pushing further will cost more than the court battles and keeping favour of public opinion.

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> Any person left to "monitor" the vehicle will not be paying attention most of the time.

I'm not actually convinced that's true. Heck, people drive regular cars "mostly on autopilot". Haven't you ever "stopped paying attention" and then realize you don't even remember the last 5 minutes of driving?

But it's not really a safety issue, because your brain is very capable of automatically and instantly detecting anything out of the ordinary to alert you to, like something in the road in front of you.

Literally all you have to do is just keep your eyes on the road. You don't have to be paying constant "conscious" attention... you just have to have your eyes in the right place so your brain can automatically alert you if something's not right. Which it is excellent at doing.

Now I'm not saying that somebody can do it for 36 hours straight or without occasional breaks or whatever. But the idea that this is somehow inherently a task we're not suited for is just ludicrous.

In this particular case though, it doesn't even have anything to do with her capabilities of sustained attention. She chose to watch a TV show on her phone. She actively and consciously chose to utterly neglect her safety duties, the entire purpose of her job.

I think this is the best argument for why self-driving cars are much further away than we realize. A fully autonomous vehicle that is perfectly suited for modern city roads is a long way off. A human is still required. In this case, it seems best that the human remains in total control so that they remain in total dedication to the task. For the same reason that some aircraft autopilots shut off when they notice a problem, so that the pilot has to take full control and becomes more aware of problems like if the plane is consistently pulling left or right.

The ideal is that the car helps, but does not take total control. The car keeps you in your lane and automatically speeds up / slows down with highway traffic. It warns you when you turn on your indicator while a car is in your blind spot, and applies the brakes when it detects an imminent collision. But the car should not make turns or apply gas or allow the driver to dedicate their attention to something besides the road. It should augment, but not replace, human abilities.

"The "driver" (or rather "liability scapegoat") will bear the responsibility when things go wrong" This was a test vehicle, testing software, not a fully-fledged, mass-produced, 100% autonomous car. The backup driver's entire job was to ensure that is this test software malfunctioned, there would be someone in the seat ready to take over. We can have discussions of who's at fault when we actually build a 100% autonomous car, until then, the driver is, and should be, the one at fault.

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