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Uber backup driver indicted in 2018 self-driving crash that killed woman

234 points by runnr_az 6y ago

ping_pong 6y ago
Is it necessary to describe the woman as a transgender woman? I'm not an SJW by any means, in fact I'm the opposite because I feel facist leftists are ruining any rational conversations we are having. But I firmly believe in transgender rights, so if this person is a transgender female, shouldn't we just call her "female" instead of labelling her "transgender female" for the rest of her life?
- tastygreenapple 6y ago
  Female refers to biological sex. It would be more appropriate for this article to refer to her simply as a 'woman', but ideally just 'backup driver'.
- benmller313 6y ago
  I think it might just have been needed to clarify potential confusion around her name.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Exactly this -- it's even in the very same sentence that mentions it: >As internal video of the Uber car showed, Rafaela Vasquez, a 46-year-old transgender woman still legally known as Rafael Stuart Vasquez,
  - aaron695 6y ago
    I agree that's why they have here. Although often they will use some sort of code anyway. But independently, transgender people have used their medication as mitigating circumstances in murder trails before. So it is newsworthy.
- jedberg 6y ago
  I think they only did that to explain why her name doesn't match her legal name from the case.
- deleted 6y ago
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- tyre 6y ago
  I think in context of the article it was explaining why the name of the person who was originally reported has changed.
- deleted 6y ago
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j_walter 6y ago
It has been awhile since this happened, but at the time I thought the video showed that the woman came out between two cars right before the Volvo hit her. Perhaps more information came out during the indictment, but there has been many cases in the past where even drunk drivers were cleared of the more serious charges when it was determined that even an attentive driver wouldn't have had enough time to avoid a crash. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
- anoncareer0212 6y ago
  No, unfortunately, and the driver missed her over 1.5 lanes - it's extremely egregious https://youtu.be/51HQ5JXIvWw https://youtu.be/51HQ5JXIvWw
- stefan_ 6y ago
  You mean the video of a dashcam Uber released to deliberately make it appear as if it was pitch-black and this women came into frame like a second before impact? No, indeed it turns out this is a very well lit, wide open area and your eyes would have had no problem seeing and predicting her path from many many feet away. As of course could the $$$ industrial cams Uber actually uses to inform its vision.
  - bzb5 6y ago
    Are you suggesting Uber maliciously edited the dashcam video to hide the jaywalker? Or that a better, human-readable (ie not raw sensor data) version of the video exists and Uber has not released it?
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      I think OP is referencing how cameras (especially the cheap ones used in dash cams) don’t do a good job in lowlight conditions.
    - molf 6y ago
      Yes, it appears that Uber may have edited the video. Even if they didn't edit it and just used a very shitty dashcam, it's still incredibly misleading. There are no alternate versions of the dashcam available. However, there are comparisons of the same location made by other drivers that make it pretty clear this is a fairly well-lit stretch of road. [1] It looks nothing like the released Uber footage. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
jedberg 6y ago
I mean this makes sense. She was watching a video on her phone while driving. It was her literal job to know that the car might make mistakes and correct for them, so she should have known that she still has to pay attention as though she were actually driving.
- vaccinator 6y ago
  depends what she was told by the company I guess... and if he situation was avoidable at all
  - baddox 6y ago
    That is, presumably, something that the grand jury considered.
    - vmception 6y ago
      mmm yeah with their expert witness that can make up stuff on the spot lets just acknowledge inefficiencies in the system
      - kortilla 6y ago
        So you’re positing that the expert witness committed perjury and that Uber secretly told the driver that it was okay for her not to pay attention to what the car was doing?
        vmception 6y ago
        Miscarriage of justice possible, perjury not necessarily. I don't even know if an expert witness was there, thats how grand juries work. And that a corporation didn't tell a full truth and threw an "maybe employee" under the bus? Not really that much to "posit". Ironically also trending on HN at time of writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488350
rbtprograms 6y ago
I think fault, specifically when it comes to litigation, is something that will end up holding back self-driving cars (at least in the USA). If there is an accident or someone is injured, who ends up getting sued? How does insurance resolve these claims? Please note that I am not saying I think someone needs to get sued. I just think that the concept of liability is deeply ingrained in the American legal and insurance systems, and I almost forsee a future where we cannot come to terms with who is liable in different situations and it coming to preventing the adoption of and progression of self-driving vehicles.
- rvnx 6y ago
  Perhaps a solution would be a liability chain ? Get sued personally as the vehicle operator, and then sue the car manufacturer yourself ? This way people will be pushed to pick the safest cars, or to adapt their attitude when the self-driving functionalities are unsafe.
  - rvnx 6y ago
    It seems unfair due to the high costs though, meh quite a bad idea.
  - thelean12 6y ago
    This doesn't help if you go to jail for the actions of the self driving car. (Generally. I'm not talking about the specific case linked). Also, consumers can't be trusted to pick the safest cars. Most consumers choose on price, not safety features.
    - rvnx 6y ago
      I may have a solution then, In the future, let's imagine in 20 years, we may see "cars as a service", so essentially you can summon a Tesla, and the Tesla can bring you anywhere. In that perspective, isn't it clear that the liability is to the company that organised the trip ? In similar way to when you get carried by a bus, a taxi or a train ?
tunesmith 6y ago
One of the other front page articles right now is the PDF about Judea Pearl's book, and it describes exactly this case, including that there was a roughly six second window. And that the car normally had a feature to stop in those cases, but that the engineers (who I take to not be the driver) turned it off due to false positives. I'm still unclear on how they find liability here - should it all fall on the driver? You could argue "but for" the driver's failure to pay enough attention to stop in those six seconds, and you could also argue "but for" the engineers' decision to turn off the safety feature.
- jbay808 6y ago
  False positives are dangerous, because cars stopping suddenly and unexpectedly can be dangerous. The engineers probably were right to disable that, if the false positive rate was too high.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
    IF the engineers told the driver, "Hey, we disabled pretty much all the safety features on your vehicle because we can't figure out how to make them work -- so be Extra Careful!!!" --- well, maybe. But shifting the blame onto a low-wage worker to shield Corporate Hubris seems....wrong.
    - true_religion 6y ago
      It's not any more responsibility than any other low wage work would have as a driver. You can put someone in a car without collision avoidance or even anti lock brakes, and it's okay to ask the driver to use their own skill and judgment instead.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I think GP is talking about the OEM system that shipped with the car. Considering that their false positive rates are so low as to not annoy human drivers I don't see why they disabled it.
  - 6y ago
pvelagal 6y ago
I am wondering if the company responsible for self driving software/hardware be liable ? If not 100% , then to what extent?
- ping_pong 6y ago
  This is going to be what happens in the future, if Autopilot runs over a person. Tesla will do their best to prove that your hands weren't on the wheel, and they weren't at fault, just like when that Apple engineer died on 101.
  - pvelagal 6y ago
    I think insurance companies have a role to play here. They should refuse coverage when driver is not operating the vehicle 100% of the time. To them it is two drivers splitting responsibility. Insurance/ law enforcement must demand additional coverage, for self driving cars.. a separate coverage for “software driver”. In addition DMVs should test each self driving car for a special drivers license.. just as they test a regular driver.
kag0 6y ago
The car was speeding before it hit the woman, and the driver was most probably watching TV before/as it happened. I can see how this would be bad press for self-driving cars, but this really seems like the error is on the driver. Maybe Uber failed to adequately communicate to her what her role was in the car, but otherwise it seems like pretty open and shut negligence.
- fernly 6y ago
  The article say the collision happened at 39mph. Was that over the limit for that location? If so, the (design of the) automated car should be partly at fault. Self-drive cars should never exceed a speed limit. The defense attorney can argue that if the car had gone at legal speed for the location, the driver would have had more time to react, while the victim might have survived a slower impact. To which the prosecutor might reply, the safety driver had responsibility to keep the speed legal, along with everything else.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    The speed limit is simply irrelevant from a safety perspective. The number on a sign is just that, a number. Sure you can use it in the absence of all else but it should be tossed if there's any other information to use. Self driving cars should be going as fast as whatever is normal for the rest of the traffic in those conditions and at that time. Creeping along at 55mph in the right line while 75mph traffic dodges you is anything but safe. Safety is achieved through homogeneous traffic flow and in practice that means not having a minority of traffic that's going very fast nor very slow nor a bimodal distribution. Modern civil engineering doctrine is to set the speed limit based on traffic speed and to control the traffic speed with the road design/features so "but the law" holds about as much water as a net if the goal is safety. That said, the court cares about the letter of the law (as it should) so your proposed defense may in fact be beneficial. Edit: Whether I care matters not.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      You may not care, but others do. That makes the anomalous speeding vehicle now difficulty to anticipate for crossing pedestrians.
yholio 6y ago
The six levels of vehicle autonomy are marketing bullshit. They imply failure of automation is acceptable and the human can be left to pick up the slack. In reality, there is no spectrum of automated driving, with the human doing less and less. Driving is not an instantaneous activity like swimming, it requires planing and strategizing, the decisions made in the past influence situational awareness. I plan an overtake maneuver based on a myriad factors and have escape routes already planned if things don't go well. When the automated driver fails a human driver cannot be expected to just drop in and correct the mistakes - by that time, they are uncorectable and the ramp-up time of the human driver far exceeds the available time in most real life situations. In the overtake example, if the autopilot fails when a 20 ton truck is approaching, I have no recourse, I have no idea if an attempt to brake and regroup will be successful because I did not plan the maneuver. Therefore, computer drivers cannot be allowed to fail in such a scenario. In practice, there are only two real levels: 1. autonomous; and 0. non-autonomous, with various automation that helps the driver, while he remains fully in control and the sole decision maker. What can constitute a self-driving spectrum is the type of road where full automation is expected to work: from restricted and instrumented roads, where only other similar vehicles are allowed, for the dumbest self-driving modes, and up to full self-driving on general purpose roads mixed with human drivers and pedestrians. But the idea that you can achieve level 5 self driving by incrementally improving the systems designed to aid the driver is a dangerous pipe dream.
- bob1029 6y ago
  I still think general AI (i.e. AI so advanced that we would consider protecting each instance as we would a human life) is a prerequisite for truly autonomous driving on our complex roadways today. This is the kind of game theory that would make me feel more comfortable sharing the road with these kinds of cars. I completely agree with the assertion that the grey area in between is where a bunch of people are going to wind up dead.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > I completely agree with the assertion that the grey area in between is where a bunch of people are going to wind up dead. But will more people end up dead than in the scenario where we had no ‘self-driving’ cars at all? Humans are much more accident prone than robots in all the research on this I’ve seen.
davidhyde 6y ago
> "The vehicle operator’s prolonged visual distraction, a typical effect of automation complacency, led to her failure to detect the pedestrian in time to avoid the collision." This is quite an important point. It was very dangerous of Uber to disable both the car’s built-in collision avoidance system and to have nothing to replace it but the backup driver especially when there is a non-zero risk of automation complacency. I’m not trying to cover for the driver as they were clearly at fault. The evidence seems overwhelming. However, Uber shouldn’t be cleared of fault just because the backup driver is found guilty.
- cyrux004 6y ago
  For a development vehicle,I am assuming they bypassed the car's stock functionality I am sure they had their own braking system that was supposed to stop for cars, pedestrians, cyclists etc. It didnt function currently at that time
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I still haven't heard a good reason for them to not have also been running Volvo's system in parallel. Considering that the system is clearly not so hair trigger that humans hate it it shouldn't hobble their AI and it seems like all upside and no downside to me.
  - davidhyde 6y ago
    > "Uber had disconnected the Volvo's factory-installed crash avoidance system. While the Uber vehicle's autonomous system did detect Herzberg before the impact, the vehicle — and Uber — relied on Vasquez to take action if an emergency arose." The Uber software can detect an imminent collision but relies on the backup driver to act on it. For everything else the car is designed to drive itself. This is why "automation complacency" should not be ignored.
- SilasX 6y ago
  This. Keep in mind, they rotate lifeguards every 15 minutes, specifically because it's boring and hard to hold attention. It was negligent of Uber not to have some kind of countermeasure like this, even if the driver takes some responsibility.
yodon 6y ago
As systems become more reliable, it becomes progressively harder for humans to stay focused and maintain the concentration required to respond in the way this driver was expected to respond. Yes, the driver is at fault for failing to maintain vigilance, but the engineers who built this system are far more at fault for designing a system whose operating parameters (long stretches of nothing to do culminating in either more nothing to do or a sudden life or death emergency requiring full concentration to detect and process and prevent) are well outside the operating envelope of the human in the system. The driver was hired to perform a task that was almost guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some driver was behind the wheels. She didn't have any way to know that, but the engineers did.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  > The driver was hired to perform a task that was almost guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some driver was behind the wheels. Every airline pilot is hired to perform a task that is guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some pilot is behind the [yoke/sidestick]. Every Registry/Department of Motor Vehicles each weekday grants licenses to civilians which are guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some of them are behind the wheel. Every commercial truck driver is hired to perform a task... That can't possibly be the standard by which we object.
  - yodon 6y ago
    Airline pilots are highly trained, subject to regular physical inspections and testing, and spend much of their careers practicing for emergency procedures to maintain their vigilance. Auto and truck drivers operating normal vehicles are in a state of at least partial task concentration while operating their vehicles. The task concentration context in which this test driver was seated was completely unlike that of a normal vehicle driver.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  > The driver was hired to perform a task that was almost guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some driver was behind the wheels. She didn't have any way to know that, but the engineers did. I think the culpability lies a bit more on her than you imply... she was watching a video on her phone instead of surveying the road/instruments for dangers
shajznnckfke 6y ago
I think it’s useful not to label this person’s job “driver”, but instead “fall guy”. Their job is to sit around all day doing absolutely nothing. But in the rare event where the car fails, they need to suddenly become alert and fix it, or take the blame for the machine’s failure. I think it’s less accurate to describe this transaction as a form of labor, but instead as an indemnity, an assumption of liability, paid for via a wage. For train conductors with a similar challenge, a solution has been invented requiring them to pass various visual attention challenges that detect if they aren’t alert. Such systems weren’t present here. The system wasn’t designed to work - it was designed to protect Uber by shifting the blame for failure.
- zkms 6y ago
  > I think it’s useful not to label this person’s job “driver”, but instead “fall guy”. Or "sacrificial part" -- designed to break first to protect the rest of the system. The NTSB report (https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAR1903.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...) is an interesting read, by the way.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Corporate equivalent of ablative armor then?
- _jal 6y ago
  This is exactly right. This job is a wage against a (very nasty) lottery ticket, to sit there to absorb the legal fallout for decisions made far away.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  It is hard to imagine they weren’t aware that their job involved doing nothing (but pay attention to the road). I’d be inclined to give them a pass if they were looking at the road and just inattentive (because that’s expected, like you say), but I find it hard to sympathize with someone watching a show on their phone, explicitly ignoring their one job.
thedudeabides5 6y ago
No comment on her particular case, but interesting to think that buried in the End User License Agreement is fine print that says (to some effect): "If you rely on our product for autonomous driving and accidentally kill someone, images from your car's internal cameras will be used against you in the court of public opinion, as well as the court of law." Like, not sure this is something people who buy 1996 Toyota Camry really have to worry about. https://images1.phoenixnewtimes.com/imager/u/blog/11494117/vasquez-1.jpg https://images1.phoenixnewtimes.com/imager/u/blog/11494117/v...
foobar1962 6y ago
Uber disabled the Volvo's auto crash-avoidance feature. That should amount to some culpability. Who is going to want work as autonomous vehicle backup drive now? I don't think it's reasonable to expect a person to be attentive 100% of the time, given the nature of the task (just sit and wait for a problem).
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itronitron 6y ago
The Volvo's emergency braking system would have prevented that accident if Uber had not deactivated it.
- delfinom 6y ago
  It also helps if Uber used quality vision cameras instead of whatever garbage they we're using and attempting to say "look at how unlit and dark the road was!!". Meanwhile it was a pretty well lit city streets when people visited it.
  - MertsA 6y ago
    That footage was not what was used by the computer to do any vision augmentation. It was solely a dash camera separate from the self driving system. Uber's sensor platform was more than adequate.
slg 6y ago
>Uber made a series of development decisions that contributed to the crash’s cause, the NTSB said...Uber deactivated the automatic emergency braking systems in the Volvo XC90 vehicle and precluded the use of immediate emergency braking, relying instead on the back-up driver. If the driver committed homicide, it sure sounds like Uber is also guilty of homicide.
- deleted 6y ago
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- clusterfish 6y ago
  Deactivating this optional feature is somehow worse than buying a car without such feature in the first place? The latter is neither illegal nor immoral. The safety driver had an actual job to do, he wasn't there "instead" of automatic emergency braking - which is not certified for driverless operation btw. But he was distracted with a phone instead of looking at the road. The halo effect here is unreal.
  - bb611 6y ago
    The American legal system places much more emphasis on acts you may have committed than omissions, and tends to avoid compelling action. So yes, in an American court, disabling a proven safety feature is significantly worse than simply purchasing a vehicle without the feature. The safety driver failed at their job, but the NTSB clearly lays significant blame for that failure on Uber, who should know well that humans are poorly suited to monitoring automated systems, and committed acts and omissions that increased the likelihood of an accident.
    - tomalpha 6y ago
      This brings to mind the classic Trolley Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem The scenario is notably different, but it does dig into the issues around acts vs omissions and how we perceive them.
  - sebws 6y ago
samcheng 6y ago
That poor person is Uber's "moral crumple zone" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757236 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757236 Fitting, given Uber's reputation for questionable morality...
- clusterfish 6y ago
  Guy was using his phone not paying attention to the road when testing experimental equipment on a public road. He was there specifically to mitigate potential malfunctions of said experimental equipment, but he was reading reddit or whatever instead of keeping lookout. I can't see how this is not clear cut negligence.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I give you a weight, you are to hold the weight in front of you with your arm outstretched, for 12 hours straight. If you drop your arm then a random person is shot. If you drop the weight is the death your fault or my fault for putting you in an impossible, for a human, situation? Humans are very bad at paying attention for a rare event and having nothing else to do 99.999% of the rest of the time. This is surely well known to the people who set up this system in the self driving car.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Not even remotely the same thing. Dude was paid to pay attention. He didn't. It wasn't because he got fatigued, it was because he was deliberately doing something else, by choice
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        When people are bored they get distracted and do other things. This is well known human nature and very few people are suited to this sort of task. The people who set up the self-driving car should have known better than the uneducated poor person who is being sacrificed.
rudiv 6y ago
When Ambani's driver went to jail in place of his son his family got crores. I wonder how much Uber's gonna give this person and/or their family?
- scott31 6y ago
  Why should Uber give them anything?
  - rudiv 6y ago
    Why shouldn't Uber give them anything? Also, who's them?
ogre_codes 6y ago
If this wasn't a self driving car and it was just a normal driver texting while driving at night, it would never have gone to court. The driver would have said "I didn't see her", and the police wouldn't have even charged her. This is particularly true since the victim was homeless.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Here in the UK we have a specific law that doubles the penalties for careless driving if you're using a phone. If you ran someone over you'd be charged with 'causing death by wreckless driving' and you'd probably spend some time in prison. Saying "I didn't see her" would be an admission of guilt.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Wasn't considering the phone at all. In a lot of places in the US, using a phone is also a distraction likely to get you jail/ conviction. (In some places it's considered driving impaired). The accident would just never have gotten the scrutiny it did. Unless the driver came out and mentioned they were using their phone, the whole incident would have just vanished. They certainly wouldn't have bothered getting a subpoena to check the drivers cell record.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      You're suggesting that if a driver runs someone over and kills them the police wouldn't do a basic check like looking at the driver's cell phone record? It's no wonder people all over the US want to defund the police if they're that incompetent. That would not happen here in the UK.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        Just in general, if you ever want to kill someone in the US, run them over with a car. So long as nobody sees you do it and you aren't drunk or do something silly to make it obvious it was deliberate, it's unlikely you will be convicted. If they are on a bike, it's even easier to get away with.
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z3t4 6y ago
Good to know that the safety equipment in the car (camera etc) is there for the car company's protection and not the drivers and pedestrian protection.
dbuder 6y ago
Uber knew their backup drivers would become distracted, then this woman did and now she has been indicted. All the blame rests on those at Uber and I bet they sit around drinking cognac, laughing about how bad it would be if it were someone with a rich family. Throw some blame to the governments who allowed this totally not ready technology into our public streets.
paul7986 6y ago
Disgusting that Uber isn't getting the same, along with the heads who spun/put this killing machine on the road. Pays to be rich and well connected! Gross!!!
miduil 6y ago
What a transphobic article omg, why to highlight the person's transgenderness? Why her deadname? So rude. (These are rhetoric questions, please don't answer this)
- miduil 6y ago
  Of course you're getting down voted on HN for pointing out transphobia. :(
- 56264 6y ago
  You're being downvoted because this site is overrun with cis-male-het-white privileged shitlords. If anything, I'm more concerned that transwomen (I hate that we even still use that term instead of calling them what they are: women) can be singled out and made targets of hate and ridicule, and blamed for the engineering failings of $80 billion dollar companies. That is the real tragedy here. That if you're trans, you're easily scapegoated, like poor Rafaela Vasquez.
alextheparrot 6y ago
This job reminds me a lot of when I lifeguarded in high school during the summer. You sit on a chair in the sun, waiting for something to happen. The job is not stimulating, which further increases the difficulty of recognising if someone is in trouble - try watching some rescue training videos [0]. While a lot of the interventions a lifeguard does are prophylactic (“No running!” vs administering first aid to someone who tripped and split their skull open), interventions did happen a few times a month. To make sure those interventions happen when needed, pools implement processes to better manage the risk. These processes seem to be the key difference between that job and this one. Rotations every 30 minutes, a manager actively observing for engagement, and overlapping zones of coverage all were instrumental in 0 fatalities - I can recall examples where each of those saved at least one person’s life. Redundancy, supervision, and engagement are what make a pool safe. While I think this woman failed to do her job and may be punished for it, it is important to question why your community pool has better safeguards than an experimental car. [0] https://youtu.be/4sFuULOY5ik https://youtu.be/4sFuULOY5ik
- randycupertino 6y ago
  I think the key difference is the backup driver was watching a video on her phone when the accident happened. I was a summer lifeguard on the ocean for many years (SOYA summer! Sit On Your Ass Summer), and we would have been fired if browsed our phones while on duty.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    I’m in complete agreement with your assessment on that. If the processes I mentioned above weren’t in place and someone drowned while the lifeguard was watching a video or reading a magazine, they should be held to account. I’m remiss to completely remove individual agency from scenarios like this. The processes just help make those failure cases less accessible because you get fired before it happens. 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.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
So thinking about this "car going the speed limit even if conditions warrant going slower" thing, it makes me ask some questions: 1. Are there any statistics on how often road conditions do not match speed limits? I mean governmental statistics. 2. Are there any statistics on the same, but at night (I would assume speed limits are more likely to be higher than conditions warrant at night) 3. If 1 and or 2 does Uber have data on how often drivers take over the car because of conditions not matching the posted speed limit, how often does that happen? 4. Does Uber have any sort of policy regarding drivers who take over frequently? It just seems to me, given what I know of corporate mentality, that Uber as a whole (or some managers hoping to up their metrics) might penalize or get rid of drivers who took over 'too' frequently in comparison to other drivers. Obviously taking over is good for the machine learning, but you can't reward it either or people will start taking over when they shouldn't. I think there are probably incentives for the company to reduce the amount of drivers taking over. Aside from that I was thinking - if you're a lawyer on HN and think this person is taking the fall somewhat unfairly, there might be arguments in this thread that would be worth sending to the lawyer representing the driver (his name is given in the article) - I of course mean worth it from a legal standpoint, because there might be expertise in some of these posts that the lawyer would not be aware of unless informed.
aronpye 6y ago
Isn’t the pedestrian that got hit at least partially responsible? They were crossing a live road, unlit, and not at a designated crossing. I get that the driver has a duty to mitigate / avoid an accident if possible, but the circumstances didn’t involve the driver running a red light or driving into a designated pedestrian area. I’m curious as to whether her defence in court will fall along those lines, as it simply can’t be a case where she is entirely at fault? I would have thought it would be 50/50 liability as both parties had equal opportunity to avoid the accident. The driver should have seen the pedestrian, and the pedestrian should not have jaywalked. I get that this may be an unpopular line of reasoning, but please comment if you disagree, don’t just downvote.
simon_000666 6y ago
There's a good black mirror episode that sorta covers this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithereens_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithereens_(Black_Mirror) Is it the drivers fault? Is it the company that put them in a situation which makes it more than likely to happen? Is it big tech fault's for systematically addicting people to dopamine and nudging them into the belief that they can successfully multi-task without problem? There are a couple of open questions for me : Did Uber take the proper care to train and onboard this person and make it clear that their role was to be attentive at all times? Why did they disable the built-in autostop without a back-up? Why was there no system monitoring and alerting on the attentiveness of the driver? - This is surely easier in comparison to a fully automated vehicle. I wonder whether if instead of checking a mobile phone, she had been distracted by lighting a cigarette how would this change the case? These are the types of legal grey zones we will see more and more of with increasing automation of transport, weapons etc. My own opinion is that ultimate culpability is with all three parties.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  I wonder if the Black Mirror episode was based on this crash.
dathinab 6y ago
The problem is if you have nothing to do it's really hard to stay concentrated even if you star on the road instead of your phone. It's like saying: - we drive for you so that you don't have to concentrate - if you don't concentrate you might end up in prison IMHO self driving cars are only viable if the car manufacturer is responsible for mistakes the (AI) driver they employ does. Which sadly also means they would only be on abbo basis. It's a different thing for assistant, through it's not always clear when a car with assistant becomes a self-driving car.
- jmercouris 6y ago
  abbo is not English, many people will not know that you mean "subscription"
seesawtron 6y ago
>>Tempe police found in its investigation that Vasquez's personal cell phone had been streaming a TV show at the time of the crash. I am curious how they figured this out. ISP providers were made to share the internet history for this device?
blackbrokkoli 6y ago
This discussion reminds me an awful lot of Don Normans example regarding human error: > Air Force: It was pilot error - the pilot failed to take corrective action > Inspector General: That's because the pilot was probably unconscious. > Air Force: So you agree, the pilot failed to correct the problem. We can go and blame the driver all day long but that will not actually solve anything. Was it neglect? Probably-maybe, I'm not a lawyer. But that is not the point. Why did the driver look at her phone? How can we prevent that? What other, similar failure modes are there? We did this dance with pilots, truck drivers, forklift operators, life guards, factory workers and god knows how many more. It is frankly quite disappointing that HN is overwhelmingly like "this time, we'll just blame the operator!"...
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  The operator was watching a video on her phone. That’s not failure to take action, that’s intentionally putting yourself in a position to not take action
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's also a well-known and completely predictable behavior for humans. In just about every other job requiring constant vigilance, there are multiple factors mitigating this failure mode (shift lengths counted in minutes, multiple observers, automated attention checking devices that shut down the machine if not reacted to, other employees ensuring the observers pay attention, etc.). Uber should absolutely get the blame for creating this situation in the first place; letting a self-driving car out with only a backup driver as safety, and with her phone on her to boot, should not even be allowed.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  > Why did the driver look at her phone? Because she chose to watch a TV show instead of performing her job. Yes, I'm absolutely blaming the operator on this one. I don't see how making that conscious choice, of your own free will, when your entire job is safety supervision, is anything but criminal negligence.
modzu 6y ago
was the vehicle operator an uber employee testing this thing? or like a regular uber driver? the article doesnt say, but i do know she was transgender. how is that relevant
chasd00 6y ago
i agree with the comments that say she's at fault. However, and hindsight is always 20/20, there should have been two people in the car.
ck2 6y ago
If coder writes sloppy code that causes a car to mow someone down, or a dirty/broken sensor sends bad info, shouldn't there be liability if a company is going to sell "self driving" cars? As someone who has to run and bike on roads without sidewalks and use the side lane, I am not sure if self-driving cars are going to save me from the ever increasing number of drunk/high/distracted drivers or some bug is going to think I am okay to graze at high speed because just trash or something.
thrownaway954 6y ago
but is the whole point of autonomous driving is so you can be doing other things while the car is driving itself??? cause, you know, if you have to pay attention, then technically your driving. not for nothing but they are blaming the wrong person and it upsets me that they are charging them in the first place. i love how the company is not at fault yet the employee now has to pay the price. it sickens me how our justice system works. most of the time people get charged specifically cause the da wants to make a name for themselves and i see it with this case. btw... uber better have their entire legal team helping this person out, cause this could REALLY set a president to the point where it could kill this technology. imagine if self-driving cars really do become a thing and this happened to you. personally i think the biggest mistake we made as a society is putting too many automated feature in vehicles. drivers are becoming way too laxed and dependent rather than alert.
btbuildem 6y ago
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.
- Hnaomyiph 6y ago
  "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.
- LeftHandPath 6y ago
  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.
rossdavidh 6y ago
From the NTSB report: "The vehicle operator’s prolonged visual distraction, a typical effect of automation complacency, led to her failure to detect the pedestrian in time to avoid the collision." In other words, while this person should not have been doing what she was doing, we can expect it to happen again if we let self-driving vehicles on the road again. But, Uber (who can afford a much better lawyer than the driver) was found not to have committed a crime. I think they were at least as negligent as the driver, in this case.
kfarr 6y ago
ITT: Fundamental Attribution Error. Suggested reading: Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow

234 points by runnr_az 6y ago

Is it necessary to describe the woman as a transgender woman? I'm not an SJW by any means, in fact I'm the opposite because I feel facist leftists are ruining any rational conversations we are having. But I firmly believe in transgender rights, so if this person is a transgender female, shouldn't we just call her "female" instead of labelling her "transgender female" for the rest of her life?

tastygreenapple 6y ago
Female refers to biological sex. It would be more appropriate for this article to refer to her simply as a 'woman', but ideally just 'backup driver'.
benmller313 6y ago
I think it might just have been needed to clarify potential confusion around her name.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Exactly this -- it's even in the very same sentence that mentions it: >As internal video of the Uber car showed, Rafaela Vasquez, a 46-year-old transgender woman still legally known as Rafael Stuart Vasquez,
- aaron695 6y ago
  I agree that's why they have here. Although often they will use some sort of code anyway. But independently, transgender people have used their medication as mitigating circumstances in murder trails before. So it is newsworthy.
jedberg 6y ago
I think they only did that to explain why her name doesn't match her legal name from the case.
deleted 6y ago
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tyre 6y ago
I think in context of the article it was explaining why the name of the person who was originally reported has changed.
deleted 6y ago
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j_walter 6y ago

It has been awhile since this happened, but at the time I thought the video showed that the woman came out between two cars right before the Volvo hit her. Perhaps more information came out during the indictment, but there has been many cases in the past where even drunk drivers were cleared of the more serious charges when it was determined that even an attentive driver wouldn't have had enough time to avoid a crash. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

anoncareer0212 6y ago
No, unfortunately, and the driver missed her over 1.5 lanes - it's extremely egregious https://youtu.be/51HQ5JXIvWw https://youtu.be/51HQ5JXIvWw
stefan_ 6y ago
You mean the video of a dashcam Uber released to deliberately make it appear as if it was pitch-black and this women came into frame like a second before impact? No, indeed it turns out this is a very well lit, wide open area and your eyes would have had no problem seeing and predicting her path from many many feet away. As of course could the $$$ industrial cams Uber actually uses to inform its vision.
- bzb5 6y ago
  Are you suggesting Uber maliciously edited the dashcam video to hide the jaywalker? Or that a better, human-readable (ie not raw sensor data) version of the video exists and Uber has not released it?
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    I think OP is referencing how cameras (especially the cheap ones used in dash cams) don’t do a good job in lowlight conditions.
  - molf 6y ago
    Yes, it appears that Uber may have edited the video. Even if they didn't edit it and just used a very shitty dashcam, it's still incredibly misleading. There are no alternate versions of the dashcam available. However, there are comparisons of the same location made by other drivers that make it pretty clear this is a fairly well-lit stretch of road. [1] It looks nothing like the released Uber footage. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...

jedberg 6y ago

I mean this makes sense. She was watching a video on her phone while driving. It was her literal job to know that the car might make mistakes and correct for them, so she should have known that she still has to pay attention as though she were actually driving.

vaccinator 6y ago
depends what she was told by the company I guess... and if he situation was avoidable at all
- baddox 6y ago
  That is, presumably, something that the grand jury considered.
  - vmception 6y ago
    mmm yeah with their expert witness that can make up stuff on the spot lets just acknowledge inefficiencies in the system
    - kortilla 6y ago
      So you’re positing that the expert witness committed perjury and that Uber secretly told the driver that it was okay for her not to pay attention to what the car was doing?
      - vmception 6y ago
        Miscarriage of justice possible, perjury not necessarily. I don't even know if an expert witness was there, thats how grand juries work. And that a corporation didn't tell a full truth and threw an "maybe employee" under the bus? Not really that much to "posit". Ironically also trending on HN at time of writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488350

rbtprograms 6y ago

I think fault, specifically when it comes to litigation, is something that will end up holding back self-driving cars (at least in the USA). If there is an accident or someone is injured, who ends up getting sued? How does insurance resolve these claims? Please note that I am not saying I think someone needs to get sued. I just think that the concept of liability is deeply ingrained in the American legal and insurance systems, and I almost forsee a future where we cannot come to terms with who is liable in different situations and it coming to preventing the adoption of and progression of self-driving vehicles.

rvnx 6y ago
Perhaps a solution would be a liability chain ? Get sued personally as the vehicle operator, and then sue the car manufacturer yourself ? This way people will be pushed to pick the safest cars, or to adapt their attitude when the self-driving functionalities are unsafe.
- rvnx 6y ago
  It seems unfair due to the high costs though, meh quite a bad idea.
- thelean12 6y ago
  This doesn't help if you go to jail for the actions of the self driving car. (Generally. I'm not talking about the specific case linked). Also, consumers can't be trusted to pick the safest cars. Most consumers choose on price, not safety features.
  - rvnx 6y ago
    I may have a solution then, In the future, let's imagine in 20 years, we may see "cars as a service", so essentially you can summon a Tesla, and the Tesla can bring you anywhere. In that perspective, isn't it clear that the liability is to the company that organised the trip ? In similar way to when you get carried by a bus, a taxi or a train ?

tunesmith 6y ago

One of the other front page articles right now is the PDF about Judea Pearl's book, and it describes exactly this case, including that there was a roughly six second window. And that the car normally had a feature to stop in those cases, but that the engineers (who I take to not be the driver) turned it off due to false positives. I'm still unclear on how they find liability here - should it all fall on the driver? You could argue "but for" the driver's failure to pay enough attention to stop in those six seconds, and you could also argue "but for" the engineers' decision to turn off the safety feature.

jbay808 6y ago
False positives are dangerous, because cars stopping suddenly and unexpectedly can be dangerous. The engineers probably were right to disable that, if the false positive rate was too high.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
  IF the engineers told the driver, "Hey, we disabled pretty much all the safety features on your vehicle because we can't figure out how to make them work -- so be Extra Careful!!!" --- well, maybe. But shifting the blame onto a low-wage worker to shield Corporate Hubris seems....wrong.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    It's not any more responsibility than any other low wage work would have as a driver. You can put someone in a car without collision avoidance or even anti lock brakes, and it's okay to ask the driver to use their own skill and judgment instead.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I think GP is talking about the OEM system that shipped with the car. Considering that their false positive rates are so low as to not annoy human drivers I don't see why they disabled it.
- 6y ago

pvelagal 6y ago

I am wondering if the company responsible for self driving software/hardware be liable ? If not 100% , then to what extent?

ping_pong 6y ago
This is going to be what happens in the future, if Autopilot runs over a person. Tesla will do their best to prove that your hands weren't on the wheel, and they weren't at fault, just like when that Apple engineer died on 101.
- pvelagal 6y ago
  I think insurance companies have a role to play here. They should refuse coverage when driver is not operating the vehicle 100% of the time. To them it is two drivers splitting responsibility. Insurance/ law enforcement must demand additional coverage, for self driving cars.. a separate coverage for “software driver”. In addition DMVs should test each self driving car for a special drivers license.. just as they test a regular driver.

kag0 6y ago

The car was speeding before it hit the woman, and the driver was most probably watching TV before/as it happened. I can see how this would be bad press for self-driving cars, but this really seems like the error is on the driver. Maybe Uber failed to adequately communicate to her what her role was in the car, but otherwise it seems like pretty open and shut negligence.

fernly 6y ago
The article say the collision happened at 39mph. Was that over the limit for that location? If so, the (design of the) automated car should be partly at fault. Self-drive cars should never exceed a speed limit. The defense attorney can argue that if the car had gone at legal speed for the location, the driver would have had more time to react, while the victim might have survived a slower impact. To which the prosecutor might reply, the safety driver had responsibility to keep the speed legal, along with everything else.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  The speed limit is simply irrelevant from a safety perspective. The number on a sign is just that, a number. Sure you can use it in the absence of all else but it should be tossed if there's any other information to use. Self driving cars should be going as fast as whatever is normal for the rest of the traffic in those conditions and at that time. Creeping along at 55mph in the right line while 75mph traffic dodges you is anything but safe. Safety is achieved through homogeneous traffic flow and in practice that means not having a minority of traffic that's going very fast nor very slow nor a bimodal distribution. Modern civil engineering doctrine is to set the speed limit based on traffic speed and to control the traffic speed with the road design/features so "but the law" holds about as much water as a net if the goal is safety. That said, the court cares about the letter of the law (as it should) so your proposed defense may in fact be beneficial. Edit: Whether I care matters not.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    You may not care, but others do. That makes the anomalous speeding vehicle now difficulty to anticipate for crossing pedestrians.

yholio 6y ago

The six levels of vehicle autonomy are marketing bullshit. They imply failure of automation is acceptable and the human can be left to pick up the slack. In reality, there is no spectrum of automated driving, with the human doing less and less. Driving is not an instantaneous activity like swimming, it requires planing and strategizing, the decisions made in the past influence situational awareness. I plan an overtake maneuver based on a myriad factors and have escape routes already planned if things don't go well. When the automated driver fails a human driver cannot be expected to just drop in and correct the mistakes - by that time, they are uncorectable and the ramp-up time of the human driver far exceeds the available time in most real life situations. In the overtake example, if the autopilot fails when a 20 ton truck is approaching, I have no recourse, I have no idea if an attempt to brake and regroup will be successful because I did not plan the maneuver. Therefore, computer drivers cannot be allowed to fail in such a scenario. In practice, there are only two real levels: 1. autonomous; and 0. non-autonomous, with various automation that helps the driver, while he remains fully in control and the sole decision maker. What can constitute a self-driving spectrum is the type of road where full automation is expected to work: from restricted and instrumented roads, where only other similar vehicles are allowed, for the dumbest self-driving modes, and up to full self-driving on general purpose roads mixed with human drivers and pedestrians. But the idea that you can achieve level 5 self driving by incrementally improving the systems designed to aid the driver is a dangerous pipe dream.

bob1029 6y ago
I still think general AI (i.e. AI so advanced that we would consider protecting each instance as we would a human life) is a prerequisite for truly autonomous driving on our complex roadways today. This is the kind of game theory that would make me feel more comfortable sharing the road with these kinds of cars. I completely agree with the assertion that the grey area in between is where a bunch of people are going to wind up dead.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > I completely agree with the assertion that the grey area in between is where a bunch of people are going to wind up dead. But will more people end up dead than in the scenario where we had no ‘self-driving’ cars at all? Humans are much more accident prone than robots in all the research on this I’ve seen.

davidhyde 6y ago

> "The vehicle operator’s prolonged visual distraction, a typical effect of automation complacency, led to her failure to detect the pedestrian in time to avoid the collision." This is quite an important point. It was very dangerous of Uber to disable both the car’s built-in collision avoidance system and to have nothing to replace it but the backup driver especially when there is a non-zero risk of automation complacency. I’m not trying to cover for the driver as they were clearly at fault. The evidence seems overwhelming. However, Uber shouldn’t be cleared of fault just because the backup driver is found guilty.

cyrux004 6y ago
For a development vehicle,I am assuming they bypassed the car's stock functionality I am sure they had their own braking system that was supposed to stop for cars, pedestrians, cyclists etc. It didnt function currently at that time
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I still haven't heard a good reason for them to not have also been running Volvo's system in parallel. Considering that the system is clearly not so hair trigger that humans hate it it shouldn't hobble their AI and it seems like all upside and no downside to me.
- davidhyde 6y ago
  > "Uber had disconnected the Volvo's factory-installed crash avoidance system. While the Uber vehicle's autonomous system did detect Herzberg before the impact, the vehicle — and Uber — relied on Vasquez to take action if an emergency arose." The Uber software can detect an imminent collision but relies on the backup driver to act on it. For everything else the car is designed to drive itself. This is why "automation complacency" should not be ignored.
SilasX 6y ago
This. Keep in mind, they rotate lifeguards every 15 minutes, specifically because it's boring and hard to hold attention. It was negligent of Uber not to have some kind of countermeasure like this, even if the driver takes some responsibility.

yodon 6y ago

As systems become more reliable, it becomes progressively harder for humans to stay focused and maintain the concentration required to respond in the way this driver was expected to respond. Yes, the driver is at fault for failing to maintain vigilance, but the engineers who built this system are far more at fault for designing a system whose operating parameters (long stretches of nothing to do culminating in either more nothing to do or a sudden life or death emergency requiring full concentration to detect and process and prevent) are well outside the operating envelope of the human in the system. The driver was hired to perform a task that was almost guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some driver was behind the wheels. She didn't have any way to know that, but the engineers did.

sokoloff 6y ago
> The driver was hired to perform a task that was almost guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some driver was behind the wheels. Every airline pilot is hired to perform a task that is guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some pilot is behind the [yoke/sidestick]. Every Registry/Department of Motor Vehicles each weekday grants licenses to civilians which are guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some of them are behind the wheel. Every commercial truck driver is hired to perform a task... That can't possibly be the standard by which we object.
- yodon 6y ago
  Airline pilots are highly trained, subject to regular physical inspections and testing, and spend much of their careers practicing for emergency procedures to maintain their vigilance. Auto and truck drivers operating normal vehicles are in a state of at least partial task concentration while operating their vehicles. The task concentration context in which this test driver was seated was completely unlike that of a normal vehicle driver.
weaksauce 6y ago
> The driver was hired to perform a task that was almost guaranteed to result in a deadly injury while some driver was behind the wheels. She didn't have any way to know that, but the engineers did. I think the culpability lies a bit more on her than you imply... she was watching a video on her phone instead of surveying the road/instruments for dangers

shajznnckfke 6y ago

I think it’s useful not to label this person’s job “driver”, but instead “fall guy”. Their job is to sit around all day doing absolutely nothing. But in the rare event where the car fails, they need to suddenly become alert and fix it, or take the blame for the machine’s failure. I think it’s less accurate to describe this transaction as a form of labor, but instead as an indemnity, an assumption of liability, paid for via a wage. For train conductors with a similar challenge, a solution has been invented requiring them to pass various visual attention challenges that detect if they aren’t alert. Such systems weren’t present here. The system wasn’t designed to work - it was designed to protect Uber by shifting the blame for failure.

zkms 6y ago
> I think it’s useful not to label this person’s job “driver”, but instead “fall guy”. Or "sacrificial part" -- designed to break first to protect the rest of the system. The NTSB report (https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAR1903.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...) is an interesting read, by the way.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Corporate equivalent of ablative armor then?
_jal 6y ago
This is exactly right. This job is a wage against a (very nasty) lottery ticket, to sit there to absorb the legal fallout for decisions made far away.
Aeolun 6y ago
It is hard to imagine they weren’t aware that their job involved doing nothing (but pay attention to the road). I’d be inclined to give them a pass if they were looking at the road and just inattentive (because that’s expected, like you say), but I find it hard to sympathize with someone watching a show on their phone, explicitly ignoring their one job.

thedudeabides5 6y ago

No comment on her particular case, but interesting to think that buried in the End User License Agreement is fine print that says (to some effect): "If you rely on our product for autonomous driving and accidentally kill someone, images from your car's internal cameras will be used against you in the court of public opinion, as well as the court of law." Like, not sure this is something people who buy 1996 Toyota Camry really have to worry about. https://images1.phoenixnewtimes.com/imager/u/blog/11494117/vasquez-1.jpg https://images1.phoenixnewtimes.com/imager/u/blog/11494117/v...

foobar1962 6y ago

Uber disabled the Volvo's auto crash-avoidance feature. That should amount to some culpability. Who is going to want work as autonomous vehicle backup drive now? I don't think it's reasonable to expect a person to be attentive 100% of the time, given the nature of the task (just sit and wait for a problem).

deleted 6y ago

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itronitron 6y ago

The Volvo's emergency braking system would have prevented that accident if Uber had not deactivated it.

delfinom 6y ago
It also helps if Uber used quality vision cameras instead of whatever garbage they we're using and attempting to say "look at how unlit and dark the road was!!". Meanwhile it was a pretty well lit city streets when people visited it.
- MertsA 6y ago
  That footage was not what was used by the computer to do any vision augmentation. It was solely a dash camera separate from the self driving system. Uber's sensor platform was more than adequate.

slg 6y ago

>Uber made a series of development decisions that contributed to the crash’s cause, the NTSB said...Uber deactivated the automatic emergency braking systems in the Volvo XC90 vehicle and precluded the use of immediate emergency braking, relying instead on the back-up driver. If the driver committed homicide, it sure sounds like Uber is also guilty of homicide.

deleted 6y ago
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clusterfish 6y ago
Deactivating this optional feature is somehow worse than buying a car without such feature in the first place? The latter is neither illegal nor immoral. The safety driver had an actual job to do, he wasn't there "instead" of automatic emergency braking - which is not certified for driverless operation btw. But he was distracted with a phone instead of looking at the road. The halo effect here is unreal.
- bb611 6y ago
  The American legal system places much more emphasis on acts you may have committed than omissions, and tends to avoid compelling action. So yes, in an American court, disabling a proven safety feature is significantly worse than simply purchasing a vehicle without the feature. The safety driver failed at their job, but the NTSB clearly lays significant blame for that failure on Uber, who should know well that humans are poorly suited to monitoring automated systems, and committed acts and omissions that increased the likelihood of an accident.
  - tomalpha 6y ago
    This brings to mind the classic Trolley Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem The scenario is notably different, but it does dig into the issues around acts vs omissions and how we perceive them.
- sebws 6y ago

samcheng 6y ago

That poor person is Uber's "moral crumple zone" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757236 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757236 Fitting, given Uber's reputation for questionable morality...

clusterfish 6y ago
Guy was using his phone not paying attention to the road when testing experimental equipment on a public road. He was there specifically to mitigate potential malfunctions of said experimental equipment, but he was reading reddit or whatever instead of keeping lookout. I can't see how this is not clear cut negligence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I give you a weight, you are to hold the weight in front of you with your arm outstretched, for 12 hours straight. If you drop your arm then a random person is shot. If you drop the weight is the death your fault or my fault for putting you in an impossible, for a human, situation? Humans are very bad at paying attention for a rare event and having nothing else to do 99.999% of the rest of the time. This is surely well known to the people who set up this system in the self driving car.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Not even remotely the same thing. Dude was paid to pay attention. He didn't. It wasn't because he got fatigued, it was because he was deliberately doing something else, by choice
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      When people are bored they get distracted and do other things. This is well known human nature and very few people are suited to this sort of task. The people who set up the self-driving car should have known better than the uneducated poor person who is being sacrificed.

rudiv 6y ago

When Ambani's driver went to jail in place of his son his family got crores. I wonder how much Uber's gonna give this person and/or their family?

scott31 6y ago
Why should Uber give them anything?
- rudiv 6y ago
  Why shouldn't Uber give them anything? Also, who's them?

ogre_codes 6y ago

If this wasn't a self driving car and it was just a normal driver texting while driving at night, it would never have gone to court. The driver would have said "I didn't see her", and the police wouldn't have even charged her. This is particularly true since the victim was homeless.

onion2k 6y ago
Here in the UK we have a specific law that doubles the penalties for careless driving if you're using a phone. If you ran someone over you'd be charged with 'causing death by wreckless driving' and you'd probably spend some time in prison. Saying "I didn't see her" would be an admission of guilt.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Wasn't considering the phone at all. In a lot of places in the US, using a phone is also a distraction likely to get you jail/ conviction. (In some places it's considered driving impaired). The accident would just never have gotten the scrutiny it did. Unless the driver came out and mentioned they were using their phone, the whole incident would have just vanished. They certainly wouldn't have bothered getting a subpoena to check the drivers cell record.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    You're suggesting that if a driver runs someone over and kills them the police wouldn't do a basic check like looking at the driver's cell phone record? It's no wonder people all over the US want to defund the police if they're that incompetent. That would not happen here in the UK.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      Just in general, if you ever want to kill someone in the US, run them over with a car. So long as nobody sees you do it and you aren't drunk or do something silly to make it obvious it was deliberate, it's unlikely you will be convicted. If they are on a bike, it's even easier to get away with.

deleted 6y ago

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z3t4 6y ago

Good to know that the safety equipment in the car (camera etc) is there for the car company's protection and not the drivers and pedestrian protection.

dbuder 6y ago

Uber knew their backup drivers would become distracted, then this woman did and now she has been indicted. All the blame rests on those at Uber and I bet they sit around drinking cognac, laughing about how bad it would be if it were someone with a rich family. Throw some blame to the governments who allowed this totally not ready technology into our public streets.

paul7986 6y ago

Disgusting that Uber isn't getting the same, along with the heads who spun/put this killing machine on the road. Pays to be rich and well connected! Gross!!!

miduil 6y ago

What a transphobic article omg, why to highlight the person's transgenderness? Why her deadname? So rude. (These are rhetoric questions, please don't answer this)

miduil 6y ago
Of course you're getting down voted on HN for pointing out transphobia. :(
56264 6y ago
You're being downvoted because this site is overrun with cis-male-het-white privileged shitlords. If anything, I'm more concerned that transwomen (I hate that we even still use that term instead of calling them what they are: women) can be singled out and made targets of hate and ridicule, and blamed for the engineering failings of $80 billion dollar companies. That is the real tragedy here. That if you're trans, you're easily scapegoated, like poor Rafaela Vasquez.

alextheparrot 6y ago

This job reminds me a lot of when I lifeguarded in high school during the summer. You sit on a chair in the sun, waiting for something to happen. The job is not stimulating, which further increases the difficulty of recognising if someone is in trouble - try watching some rescue training videos [0]. While a lot of the interventions a lifeguard does are prophylactic (“No running!” vs administering first aid to someone who tripped and split their skull open), interventions did happen a few times a month. To make sure those interventions happen when needed, pools implement processes to better manage the risk. These processes seem to be the key difference between that job and this one. Rotations every 30 minutes, a manager actively observing for engagement, and overlapping zones of coverage all were instrumental in 0 fatalities - I can recall examples where each of those saved at least one person’s life. Redundancy, supervision, and engagement are what make a pool safe. While I think this woman failed to do her job and may be punished for it, it is important to question why your community pool has better safeguards than an experimental car. [0] https://youtu.be/4sFuULOY5ik https://youtu.be/4sFuULOY5ik

randycupertino 6y ago
I think the key difference is the backup driver was watching a video on her phone when the accident happened. I was a summer lifeguard on the ocean for many years (SOYA summer! Sit On Your Ass Summer), and we would have been fired if browsed our phones while on duty.
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  I’m in complete agreement with your assessment on that. If the processes I mentioned above weren’t in place and someone drowned while the lifeguard was watching a video or reading a magazine, they should be held to account. I’m remiss to completely remove individual agency from scenarios like this. The processes just help make those failure cases less accessible because you get fired before it happens. 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.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

So thinking about this "car going the speed limit even if conditions warrant going slower" thing, it makes me ask some questions: 1. Are there any statistics on how often road conditions do not match speed limits? I mean governmental statistics. 2. Are there any statistics on the same, but at night (I would assume speed limits are more likely to be higher than conditions warrant at night) 3. If 1 and or 2 does Uber have data on how often drivers take over the car because of conditions not matching the posted speed limit, how often does that happen? 4. Does Uber have any sort of policy regarding drivers who take over frequently? It just seems to me, given what I know of corporate mentality, that Uber as a whole (or some managers hoping to up their metrics) might penalize or get rid of drivers who took over 'too' frequently in comparison to other drivers. Obviously taking over is good for the machine learning, but you can't reward it either or people will start taking over when they shouldn't. I think there are probably incentives for the company to reduce the amount of drivers taking over. Aside from that I was thinking - if you're a lawyer on HN and think this person is taking the fall somewhat unfairly, there might be arguments in this thread that would be worth sending to the lawyer representing the driver (his name is given in the article) - I of course mean worth it from a legal standpoint, because there might be expertise in some of these posts that the lawyer would not be aware of unless informed.

aronpye 6y ago

Isn’t the pedestrian that got hit at least partially responsible? They were crossing a live road, unlit, and not at a designated crossing. I get that the driver has a duty to mitigate / avoid an accident if possible, but the circumstances didn’t involve the driver running a red light or driving into a designated pedestrian area. I’m curious as to whether her defence in court will fall along those lines, as it simply can’t be a case where she is entirely at fault? I would have thought it would be 50/50 liability as both parties had equal opportunity to avoid the accident. The driver should have seen the pedestrian, and the pedestrian should not have jaywalked. I get that this may be an unpopular line of reasoning, but please comment if you disagree, don’t just downvote.

simon_000666 6y ago

There's a good black mirror episode that sorta covers this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithereens_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithereens_(Black_Mirror) Is it the drivers fault? Is it the company that put them in a situation which makes it more than likely to happen? Is it big tech fault's for systematically addicting people to dopamine and nudging them into the belief that they can successfully multi-task without problem? There are a couple of open questions for me : Did Uber take the proper care to train and onboard this person and make it clear that their role was to be attentive at all times? Why did they disable the built-in autostop without a back-up? Why was there no system monitoring and alerting on the attentiveness of the driver? - This is surely easier in comparison to a fully automated vehicle. I wonder whether if instead of checking a mobile phone, she had been distracted by lighting a cigarette how would this change the case? These are the types of legal grey zones we will see more and more of with increasing automation of transport, weapons etc. My own opinion is that ultimate culpability is with all three parties.

Thorrez 6y ago
I wonder if the Black Mirror episode was based on this crash.

dathinab 6y ago

The problem is if you have nothing to do it's really hard to stay concentrated even if you star on the road instead of your phone. It's like saying: - we drive for you so that you don't have to concentrate - if you don't concentrate you might end up in prison IMHO self driving cars are only viable if the car manufacturer is responsible for mistakes the (AI) driver they employ does. Which sadly also means they would only be on abbo basis. It's a different thing for assistant, through it's not always clear when a car with assistant becomes a self-driving car.

jmercouris 6y ago
abbo is not English, many people will not know that you mean "subscription"

seesawtron 6y ago

>>Tempe police found in its investigation that Vasquez's personal cell phone had been streaming a TV show at the time of the crash. I am curious how they figured this out. ISP providers were made to share the internet history for this device?

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

This discussion reminds me an awful lot of Don Normans example regarding human error: > Air Force: It was pilot error - the pilot failed to take corrective action > Inspector General: That's because the pilot was probably unconscious. > Air Force: So you agree, the pilot failed to correct the problem. We can go and blame the driver all day long but that will not actually solve anything. Was it neglect? Probably-maybe, I'm not a lawyer. But that is not the point. Why did the driver look at her phone? How can we prevent that? What other, similar failure modes are there? We did this dance with pilots, truck drivers, forklift operators, life guards, factory workers and god knows how many more. It is frankly quite disappointing that HN is overwhelmingly like "this time, we'll just blame the operator!"...

tobyhinloopen 6y ago
The operator was watching a video on her phone. That’s not failure to take action, that’s intentionally putting yourself in a position to not take action
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's also a well-known and completely predictable behavior for humans. In just about every other job requiring constant vigilance, there are multiple factors mitigating this failure mode (shift lengths counted in minutes, multiple observers, automated attention checking devices that shut down the machine if not reacted to, other employees ensuring the observers pay attention, etc.). Uber should absolutely get the blame for creating this situation in the first place; letting a self-driving car out with only a backup driver as safety, and with her phone on her to boot, should not even be allowed.
crazygringo 6y ago
> Why did the driver look at her phone? Because she chose to watch a TV show instead of performing her job. Yes, I'm absolutely blaming the operator on this one. I don't see how making that conscious choice, of your own free will, when your entire job is safety supervision, is anything but criminal negligence.

modzu 6y ago

was the vehicle operator an uber employee testing this thing? or like a regular uber driver? the article doesnt say, but i do know she was transgender. how is that relevant

chasd00 6y ago

i agree with the comments that say she's at fault. However, and hindsight is always 20/20, there should have been two people in the car.

ck2 6y ago

If coder writes sloppy code that causes a car to mow someone down, or a dirty/broken sensor sends bad info, shouldn't there be liability if a company is going to sell "self driving" cars? As someone who has to run and bike on roads without sidewalks and use the side lane, I am not sure if self-driving cars are going to save me from the ever increasing number of drunk/high/distracted drivers or some bug is going to think I am okay to graze at high speed because just trash or something.

thrownaway954 6y ago

but is the whole point of autonomous driving is so you can be doing other things while the car is driving itself??? cause, you know, if you have to pay attention, then technically your driving. not for nothing but they are blaming the wrong person and it upsets me that they are charging them in the first place. i love how the company is not at fault yet the employee now has to pay the price. it sickens me how our justice system works. most of the time people get charged specifically cause the da wants to make a name for themselves and i see it with this case. btw... uber better have their entire legal team helping this person out, cause this could REALLY set a president to the point where it could kill this technology. imagine if self-driving cars really do become a thing and this happened to you. personally i think the biggest mistake we made as a society is putting too many automated feature in vehicles. drivers are becoming way too laxed and dependent rather than alert.

btbuildem 6y ago

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.

Hnaomyiph 6y ago
"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.
LeftHandPath 6y ago
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.

rossdavidh 6y ago

From the NTSB report: "The vehicle operator’s prolonged visual distraction, a typical effect of automation complacency, led to her failure to detect the pedestrian in time to avoid the collision." In other words, while this person should not have been doing what she was doing, we can expect it to happen again if we let self-driving vehicles on the road again. But, Uber (who can afford a much better lawyer than the driver) was found not to have committed a crime. I think they were at least as negligent as the driver, in this case.

kfarr 6y ago

ITT: Fundamental Attribution Error. Suggested reading: Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow