7 ms·

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

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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - foerbert 6y ago
      Yes, but no. The point that was trying to be made was that he was hired for a task that's fundamentally extremely difficult for humans. You can pay a person all you want to stare at paint drying so they can note down the exact moment it's perfectly dry, but don't be surprised when they do a poor job. The guy screwed up. Uber knew he almost certainly would. I won't say the guy isn't responsible at all, but pretending this is purely on him and Uber bears 0% of the responsibility is just silly. Humans are not capable of anything and everything simply because they are provided pay.
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        although I agree Uber bears most of the responsibility the analogy was ridiculous in not being fundamentally extremely difficult but basically impossible. Aside from this, if the car had been driving over the speed suitable for the conditions at the time the fall person had plenty of time to note that and take over, in that case it was more like huh, the paint is drying but it looks like it's going to rain .... long time looking like it's going to rain ... oh no should have put the covers on! But I'm betting the need to take over and drive is not properly given to the fall person either.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        My point was that what the driver did was not negligence, it was deliberate inattention. If she had been negligent, i.e., too tired to notice the pedestrian, that would have been a different matter. If she had been paying attention most of the time but inadvertently reached over to drink some coffee, that would have been a different matter. But she wasn't too tired, and she wasn't momentarily reaching for a drink; she was simply choosing not to pay attention to her job so she could do something else instead.
        foerbert 6y ago
        You're still missing what I'm trying to say, I think. I'm not talking about fatigue, or brief inattention, or anything like that. I'm saying that the inattention was basically a given. Yeah, at some point the driver went and grabbed a phone. It may have been fiddling with junk in the car, or their fingers, or day dreaming to the extent they were unaware of the world around them. Yeah, they grabbed a phone. Is that really any different from any of the above? I don't think so. Particularly considering how ingrained the reflex is to grab and fiddle with a phone when bored is. I wouldn't be surprised if they never consciously decided to pick the thing up. The task was simply unreasonable. Uber should have foreseen this problem and implemented systems to aide and monitor their drivers.
  - clusterfish 6y ago
    Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out. Don't take a boring job if you can't handle it. The required basic level of continued attention is not a superhuman skill. It's not a job for everyone but it's not exceptional at all.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      Except they're not driving, they're just watching as the car drives itself. Driving implies you are perform actions in response to the environment, these people do not, they simply sit and watch.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out. Driving a truck is in no way comparable to what this lady was tasked to do. A truck driver is performing an active task (operating a truck), this lady was supposed to be performing a passive task (monitoring a truck's driving). Active and passive tasks are very different beasts. But you're on to something with your comparison to pilots. Planes are mostly automated. When that automation fails, the pilots often lack the situational awareness to avoid a crash when they have to take over (for an example, see https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...).
      - clusterfish 6y ago
        I don't think this distinction is morally meaningful. Do passive monitoring tasks require more discipline? Probably. Are you unable to perform them? Get another job. How many times do you think this driver was distracted with the phone when doing their job? I bet it wasn't just this one time that they happened to crash. Pilots crash after hours of boredom because debugging problems in the air is hard, not because they were negligent leading up to the problem (vast majority of the time, anyway). And still by and large they succeed, it just goes unreported in the news because business-as-usual. This driver on the other hand got into an unrecoverable situation because of their own behaviour.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    She could always just take a break if she felt her attention was lacking. Or you know, not take the job in the first place if this job was so hard for her personally. It is not at all fair to make the comparison you are making.
- akira2501 6y ago
  The vehicle was travelling the posted speed limit at night, as designed. The NHTSA pointed this out that the law may require you to travel at a "safe" speed, and simply choosing to always move at the posted limit is potentially a moving violation and a design flaw. The vehicle was travelling 20mph faster than it's own "safe clear ahead" zone allowed for. Simply ignoring it's own safety limits and travelling at a higher rate of speed is a design flaw. Designing a large public road autonomous vehicle test and not taking into account an easily predicted human vulnerability that's been known in other automation experiments for decades is a project design flaw. Whether or not the driver is at some fault, I think the court will be capable of determining that. Arizona's willingness to completely disregard the mountains of negligence on part of a giant corporation is disturbing.
  - JanSt 6y ago
    Isn't it the drivers job to take control whenever there is a design flaw? I thought that was the exact job description. If the car is going over it's speed limit, the driver should react. I see that some people think Uber should have added systems to control the safety driver. I think that's a fair point, but it doesn't take away the drivers responsibility. They knew the car isn't perfect. It's their job to take over control whenever that happens.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Their job, as designed, is impossible. Automation complacency is well-known and well-studied -- any system which requires no input for an hour and then requires you to act randomly within seconds is an impossible task for humans. Volvo's self-driving (hands-on-wheel required) accounts for that. Uber's did not.
  - clusterfish 6y ago
    Uber posted a safety driver specifically to make the car safe at regular speeds despite the limitations of the autonomous system. That driver just wasn't doing their job.
- ardy42 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. 1) The driver is a woman. 2) While I think the driver does bear some fault here, they don't bear all the fault. Uber designed an unsafe system that relied on an unnatural amount of vigilance from a single person while simultaneously discouraging that vigilance [1]. They didn't design the car to shut down when one of it's critical safety components (the driver) was not operating correctly, and they didn't even give that driver amphetamines or something to increase their vigilance to artificial levels. [1] Basically: pay close attention to a boring process while doing absolutely nothing for hours on end. I'm pretty sure that's a classic "humans suck at this" task.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    Modern cars are essentially self driving on the highway, and it doesn't require an an unnatural level vigilance to operate them. To be fair, the driver's assistance features are usually come with an attention monitor, so Uber is negligent in that aspect. Also, no one said the driver has to do nothing. They can safely listen to audiobooks or talk on the phone.
    - cocire 6y ago
      talking on the phone can be nearly as distracting as watching TV in some cases. it's also illegal in a lot of places...
      - gjs278 6y ago
        pretty much nowhere is it illegal to talk on the phone while driving if it's in hands free mode
  - HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
    I agree with you except for > and they didn't even give that driver amphetamines Yo, what? IIRC, most *amphetamines are either illegal in the US or like FDA Class 1 substances or something like that, and you just want to throw them at people operating > 1 ton machinery? That seems like it could have an even higher risk for danger.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  This is the first of many such cases to come. It's unreasonable to hold someone accountable for a "self-driving car" that suddenly decides at a split-seconds notice that it can't cope driving. Of course this is extra bad because it's an experimental car, but it's the same in my opinion with those Teslas on the road now that do the same thing.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    > It's unreasonable to hold someone accountable for a "self-driving car" It is not unreasonable at all. She had one job to do - look at the road. She failed it because she felt that her entertainment was more important than doing her job. She picked up her phone and started streaming videos. She failed at her one job, plain and simple. She knew everything about the job and still chose to watch some videos and risk lives.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
      I said it was slightly worse in this case and sibling commenters have addressed this issue. The experimental car shouldn't have been on the road at all if the only thing separating it from killing people is someone who is expected to maintain concentration for hours/days while simultaneously not actually doing anything.
      - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
        How do you expect the humanity to create a self-driving car then? Somehow magically create it from 0% to 100% in a lab, and then let out on the street? This is never going to work, it needs testing on public roads. What is your plan then? How do you propose FSD cars should be developed?
        ycombobreaker 6y ago
        For starters, Uber could have just not disabled the existing failsafe mechanisms that the car had. Then, if we start with the expectation that a human in the loop is necessary for live testing, we could have two. It reduces the impact of independent failures. It also adds some social pressure to avoid negligence. It also provides overlapping coverage, as a lifeguard in this thread has pointed out. Humans are fallible. Accept that, and design systems to be safe despite individual errors. Driving a car is not the same aa monitoring a self driving car. There will be differences in attentiveness. Stop equating them.
taneq 6y ago
The poor guy's a lady. Other than that, agreed. Edit: Post fixed now, disregard. :)
- samcheng 6y ago
  Sorry! I should know better than to assume gender these days. Fixed.
- kikokikokiko 6y ago
  He can desire reeeeaaaallllyyyy hard to be a lady all he wants, but he'll never be one. Reality does not change just because of human desire. The guy deserves to be treated with the same amount of respect as any human being does, but he haves no authority over me to obligate me to say an airplane is a submarine. On the subject at hand, he was paid to do one job: look at the road and be the safety net between an experimental car and the other people on the road. If he was listening to a podcast using headphones it could have been avoided, but he was looking down at his phone for the whole duration of the recorded video we have from the incident. It's negligent homicide just as it would be to any other machine operator, on any other industry, that did not fulfilled his duty to the company that contracted him would.
jameslk 6y ago
> After the crash, police obtained search warrants for Vasquez's cellphones as well as records from the video streaming services Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. The investigation concluded that because the data showed she was streaming The Voice over Hulu at the time of the collision, and the driver-facing camera in the Volvo showed "her face appears to react and show a smirk or laugh at various points during the time she is looking down", Vasquez may have been distracted from her primary job of monitoring road and vehicle conditions.[0] That poor person, who's job it was to watch the road, seems to have been watching Hulu instead. That's a pretty willful disregard for their job and for other's lives. I don't have much pity for them if this is the case. I get your point about moral crumple zones and I suppose there's cases one could to point to demonstrate it, but this is definitely not a very good example of it. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Distraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Distr...
- jakear 6y ago
  Agreed. > "Had the vehicle operator been attentive, she would likely have had sufficient time to detect and react to the crossing pedestrian to avoid the crash or mitigate the impact," the November 2019 NTSB report stated. This isn’t a case of the Uber performing some split-second error that needed immediate correction then blaming the driver when that didn’t happen, the way so many in this thread seem to want to make it out to be. This is a person whose job it was to watch the road watching Hulu instead and as a result failing to react to developing conditions that, if NTSB is to be believed (and I trust them a whole lot more than the randos commenting here), could have easily been prevented by an attentive driver.

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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - foerbert 6y ago
    Yes, but no. The point that was trying to be made was that he was hired for a task that's fundamentally extremely difficult for humans. You can pay a person all you want to stare at paint drying so they can note down the exact moment it's perfectly dry, but don't be surprised when they do a poor job. The guy screwed up. Uber knew he almost certainly would. I won't say the guy isn't responsible at all, but pretending this is purely on him and Uber bears 0% of the responsibility is just silly. Humans are not capable of anything and everything simply because they are provided pay.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      although I agree Uber bears most of the responsibility the analogy was ridiculous in not being fundamentally extremely difficult but basically impossible. Aside from this, if the car had been driving over the speed suitable for the conditions at the time the fall person had plenty of time to note that and take over, in that case it was more like huh, the paint is drying but it looks like it's going to rain .... long time looking like it's going to rain ... oh no should have put the covers on! But I'm betting the need to take over and drive is not properly given to the fall person either.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      My point was that what the driver did was not negligence, it was deliberate inattention. If she had been negligent, i.e., too tired to notice the pedestrian, that would have been a different matter. If she had been paying attention most of the time but inadvertently reached over to drink some coffee, that would have been a different matter. But she wasn't too tired, and she wasn't momentarily reaching for a drink; she was simply choosing not to pay attention to her job so she could do something else instead.
      - foerbert 6y ago
        You're still missing what I'm trying to say, I think. I'm not talking about fatigue, or brief inattention, or anything like that. I'm saying that the inattention was basically a given. Yeah, at some point the driver went and grabbed a phone. It may have been fiddling with junk in the car, or their fingers, or day dreaming to the extent they were unaware of the world around them. Yeah, they grabbed a phone. Is that really any different from any of the above? I don't think so. Particularly considering how ingrained the reflex is to grab and fiddle with a phone when bored is. I wouldn't be surprised if they never consciously decided to pick the thing up. The task was simply unreasonable. Uber should have foreseen this problem and implemented systems to aide and monitor their drivers.
- clusterfish 6y ago
  Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out. Don't take a boring job if you can't handle it. The required basic level of continued attention is not a superhuman skill. It's not a job for everyone but it's not exceptional at all.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Except they're not driving, they're just watching as the car drives itself. Driving implies you are perform actions in response to the environment, these people do not, they simply sit and watch.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out. Driving a truck is in no way comparable to what this lady was tasked to do. A truck driver is performing an active task (operating a truck), this lady was supposed to be performing a passive task (monitoring a truck's driving). Active and passive tasks are very different beasts. But you're on to something with your comparison to pilots. Planes are mostly automated. When that automation fails, the pilots often lack the situational awareness to avoid a crash when they have to take over (for an example, see https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...).
    - clusterfish 6y ago
      I don't think this distinction is morally meaningful. Do passive monitoring tasks require more discipline? Probably. Are you unable to perform them? Get another job. How many times do you think this driver was distracted with the phone when doing their job? I bet it wasn't just this one time that they happened to crash. Pilots crash after hours of boredom because debugging problems in the air is hard, not because they were negligent leading up to the problem (vast majority of the time, anyway). And still by and large they succeed, it just goes unreported in the news because business-as-usual. This driver on the other hand got into an unrecoverable situation because of their own behaviour.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  She could always just take a break if she felt her attention was lacking. Or you know, not take the job in the first place if this job was so hard for her personally. It is not at all fair to make the comparison you are making.
akira2501 6y ago
The vehicle was travelling the posted speed limit at night, as designed. The NHTSA pointed this out that the law may require you to travel at a "safe" speed, and simply choosing to always move at the posted limit is potentially a moving violation and a design flaw. The vehicle was travelling 20mph faster than it's own "safe clear ahead" zone allowed for. Simply ignoring it's own safety limits and travelling at a higher rate of speed is a design flaw. Designing a large public road autonomous vehicle test and not taking into account an easily predicted human vulnerability that's been known in other automation experiments for decades is a project design flaw. Whether or not the driver is at some fault, I think the court will be capable of determining that. Arizona's willingness to completely disregard the mountains of negligence on part of a giant corporation is disturbing.
- JanSt 6y ago
  Isn't it the drivers job to take control whenever there is a design flaw? I thought that was the exact job description. If the car is going over it's speed limit, the driver should react. I see that some people think Uber should have added systems to control the safety driver. I think that's a fair point, but it doesn't take away the drivers responsibility. They knew the car isn't perfect. It's their job to take over control whenever that happens.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Their job, as designed, is impossible. Automation complacency is well-known and well-studied -- any system which requires no input for an hour and then requires you to act randomly within seconds is an impossible task for humans. Volvo's self-driving (hands-on-wheel required) accounts for that. Uber's did not.
- clusterfish 6y ago
  Uber posted a safety driver specifically to make the car safe at regular speeds despite the limitations of the autonomous system. That driver just wasn't doing their job.
ardy42 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. 1) The driver is a woman. 2) While I think the driver does bear some fault here, they don't bear all the fault. Uber designed an unsafe system that relied on an unnatural amount of vigilance from a single person while simultaneously discouraging that vigilance [1]. They didn't design the car to shut down when one of it's critical safety components (the driver) was not operating correctly, and they didn't even give that driver amphetamines or something to increase their vigilance to artificial levels. [1] Basically: pay close attention to a boring process while doing absolutely nothing for hours on end. I'm pretty sure that's a classic "humans suck at this" task.
- Aunche 6y ago
  Modern cars are essentially self driving on the highway, and it doesn't require an an unnatural level vigilance to operate them. To be fair, the driver's assistance features are usually come with an attention monitor, so Uber is negligent in that aspect. Also, no one said the driver has to do nothing. They can safely listen to audiobooks or talk on the phone.
  - cocire 6y ago
    talking on the phone can be nearly as distracting as watching TV in some cases. it's also illegal in a lot of places...
    - gjs278 6y ago
      pretty much nowhere is it illegal to talk on the phone while driving if it's in hands free mode
- HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
  I agree with you except for > and they didn't even give that driver amphetamines Yo, what? IIRC, most *amphetamines are either illegal in the US or like FDA Class 1 substances or something like that, and you just want to throw them at people operating > 1 ton machinery? That seems like it could have an even higher risk for danger.
brokenmachine 6y ago
This is the first of many such cases to come. It's unreasonable to hold someone accountable for a "self-driving car" that suddenly decides at a split-seconds notice that it can't cope driving. Of course this is extra bad because it's an experimental car, but it's the same in my opinion with those Teslas on the road now that do the same thing.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  > It's unreasonable to hold someone accountable for a "self-driving car" It is not unreasonable at all. She had one job to do - look at the road. She failed it because she felt that her entertainment was more important than doing her job. She picked up her phone and started streaming videos. She failed at her one job, plain and simple. She knew everything about the job and still chose to watch some videos and risk lives.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
    I said it was slightly worse in this case and sibling commenters have addressed this issue. The experimental car shouldn't have been on the road at all if the only thing separating it from killing people is someone who is expected to maintain concentration for hours/days while simultaneously not actually doing anything.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      How do you expect the humanity to create a self-driving car then? Somehow magically create it from 0% to 100% in a lab, and then let out on the street? This is never going to work, it needs testing on public roads. What is your plan then? How do you propose FSD cars should be developed?
      - ycombobreaker 6y ago
        For starters, Uber could have just not disabled the existing failsafe mechanisms that the car had. Then, if we start with the expectation that a human in the loop is necessary for live testing, we could have two. It reduces the impact of independent failures. It also adds some social pressure to avoid negligence. It also provides overlapping coverage, as a lifeguard in this thread has pointed out. Humans are fallible. Accept that, and design systems to be safe despite individual errors. Driving a car is not the same aa monitoring a self driving car. There will be differences in attentiveness. Stop equating them.

taneq 6y ago

The poor guy's a lady. Other than that, agreed. Edit: Post fixed now, disregard. :)

samcheng 6y ago
Sorry! I should know better than to assume gender these days. Fixed.
kikokikokiko 6y ago
He can desire reeeeaaaallllyyyy hard to be a lady all he wants, but he'll never be one. Reality does not change just because of human desire. The guy deserves to be treated with the same amount of respect as any human being does, but he haves no authority over me to obligate me to say an airplane is a submarine. On the subject at hand, he was paid to do one job: look at the road and be the safety net between an experimental car and the other people on the road. If he was listening to a podcast using headphones it could have been avoided, but he was looking down at his phone for the whole duration of the recorded video we have from the incident. It's negligent homicide just as it would be to any other machine operator, on any other industry, that did not fulfilled his duty to the company that contracted him would.

jameslk 6y ago

> After the crash, police obtained search warrants for Vasquez's cellphones as well as records from the video streaming services Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. The investigation concluded that because the data showed she was streaming The Voice over Hulu at the time of the collision, and the driver-facing camera in the Volvo showed "her face appears to react and show a smirk or laugh at various points during the time she is looking down", Vasquez may have been distracted from her primary job of monitoring road and vehicle conditions.[0] That poor person, who's job it was to watch the road, seems to have been watching Hulu instead. That's a pretty willful disregard for their job and for other's lives. I don't have much pity for them if this is the case. I get your point about moral crumple zones and I suppose there's cases one could to point to demonstrate it, but this is definitely not a very good example of it. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Distraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Distr...

jakear 6y ago
Agreed. > "Had the vehicle operator been attentive, she would likely have had sufficient time to detect and react to the crossing pedestrian to avoid the crash or mitigate the impact," the November 2019 NTSB report stated. This isn’t a case of the Uber performing some split-second error that needed immediate correction then blaming the driver when that didn’t happen, the way so many in this thread seem to want to make it out to be. This is a person whose job it was to watch the road watching Hulu instead and as a result failing to react to developing conditions that, if NTSB is to be believed (and I trust them a whole lot more than the randos commenting here), could have easily been prevented by an attentive driver.