[KKKKkkkk1]

It feels perverse that when Uber's stolen technology killed a pedestrian, nobody was held liable and in fact no charges were pressed and no civil lawsuits were filed. But the person who stole that technology was indicted and is getting financially destroyed.

[wahern]

According to Wikipedia, the daughter and husband "quickly reached an undisclosed settlement" with Uber. Uber very likely paid out a large sum.

[cyphar]

That covers the civil side of things, but GPs point about criminal charges still applies. Yeah, they might have signed an NDA but I don't think those can restrict what can be uncovered during discovery (but I could be wrong -- IANAL).

[dodobirdlord]

Sure, but I'm sure some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile. People get killed in accidents all the time, and frequently nobody gets charged with anything. A person being killed in a car accident while jaywalking at night because the driver wasn't paying attention particularly well is a story as old as cars, and usually doesn't result in jail time. Turns out, people are legally allowed to drive while being really shitty drivers, and you mostly can't prosecute people criminally just for being bad at driving. If anyone was going to face criminal charges it would be the driver, and I suppose the relevant prosecutor didn't like the odds.

[tyingq]

"some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile"

Probably a prosecutor that works for some local government that could be also be liable for letting Uber operate that car in their jurisdiction. I imagine that discussion happened.

[dodobirdlord]

I doubt it, Arizona legalized self-driving cars at the state level.

[tyingq]

"The state and city of Tempe were hit with a lawsuit Monday over their alleged negligence in the fatal crash between a self-driving Uber and a pedestrian a year ago."

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2019/03/19/...

[rwmj]

> Turns out, people are legally allowed to drive while being really shitty drivers

The UK actually has a law against this, see "Causing Death by Careless or Inconsiderate Driving (Section 2B of the Road Traffic Act 1988, amended by the Road Safety Act 2006, s. 20)" here: http://www.brake.org.uk/news/15-facts-a-resources/facts/497-...

It means you can be prosecuted for causing a death in a moment of inattention. It's a bad law from both sides: As you can see from the link above it doesn't satisfy the charity (who want stronger penalties), while at the same time being a catch-all law which could catch anyone out who drives, even if they are generally very cautious drivers.

By the way I should add there was already a separate law for causing death by dangerous driving.

One more reason why we need self-driving cars I suppose.

[SilasX]

It’s illegal to run people over by accident in the US too (if it was feasibly avoidable). The parent’s point was that prosecutors usually exercise their discretion not to charge them.

[ta999999171]

...because we have no solid public transportation in most parts, and driving has become a right instead of the privilege it should be.

[wbl]

If your momentary negligence can end life, might I suggest being very careful?

[rwmj]

Absolutely. However humans are simply not built to be incredibly careful for minutes on end, day after day. One hopes self-driving cars will never let their guard down.

[shuwusxuu2he]

Prosecutors, even high profile/positioned ones, have a finite amount of resources. At the end of the day it might be romantic to go after a megacorp but a prosecutor's job is to persue justice against criminals, you might get a few high profile executive types and justice for one family (if you're the type to consider beyond the defendant) but with those same resources and time you could probably lock up at least twenty violent, in the real way, deadbeats. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, but I think it's worth acknowledging because it's why the problem is hard to solve. Everyone wants to see big fish getting hard time, but reality looks more like Harvey Dent's speech to Commissioner Gordon and that's for the good prosecutors.

[dodobirdlord]

But moreover, it's totally unreasonable that anyone would have gone to jail as a result of this, except again, maybe the driver. The driver was literally being paid to monitor the vehicle. How is an argument that high profile executive types were engaging in criminal negligence going to fly, when the bar for legal driving is already that 1 person is in the car nominally paying attention?

[Super_Jambo]

Because the driver was given an impossible task in order to save money for the company. They were required to both fill in information on a tablet and monitor the car. It's not even clear that monitoring a semi-self driving car is even possible. Constant vigilance for the 2% of edge cases where it might crash is harder than just driving. Uber had previously used two people to do this task but had switched to one person.

Executives must be prosecuted when their money saving results in deaths or else there is no incentive for them not to make this trade off.

[carapace]

> A person being killed in a car accident

But they weren't killed in a car accident, she was killed in a robot accident.

[gowld]

She was killed by an inattentive driver doing work for a corporation.

The car didn't accelerate or steer into the victim.

[vanusa]

According to Wikipedia, the daughter and husband "quickly reached an undisclosed settlement" with Uber.

That's what's called a settlement, a.k.a. hush money.

Very, very different from criminal charges.

[dangerface]

Sounds reasonable, Why doesn't Anthony Levandowski just do that?

[throwaway_tech]

>nobody was held liable and in fact no charges were pressed and no civil lawsuits were filed

As noted below Uber settled (that typically means their insurer settled) so there is no need for a civil lawsuit. That is efficiency of the system and how the system is supposed to work. In other words you only bring a suit against the insured if the insurer wrongfully denies your claim, here the insurer paid up, so there is no need for a civil suit by the estate of the deceased against Uber.

The criminal side of things is interesting...but for sake of argument lets say you were in an accident, further assume it was your fault, resulting in a fatality. Typically, unless there was a separate crime (e.g. DUI, drag racing, etc...) there will be no criminal charge, just a civil traffic ticket for the accident (in many jurisdictions there will be a specific charge/penalties for an accident resulting in a fatality, but that will still be a traffic ticket, meaning non-criminal).

I am curious if the "driver" received a traffic ticket for the accident, my guess is he did, I can't imagine the responding officer(s) not issuing a traffic ticket for an accident much less one resulting in a fatality. Interestingly these traffic tickets for accidents with fatalities do usually carry a potential penalties that include suspension of the drivers license, so I do think the law will need to catch up with reality in that regard because suspending the driver's DL doesn't seem to punish the right party in the case of a self-driving car, so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment (obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company).

[kamarg]

| obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company

Why not? They have to have some kind of license to operate, right? Even if it's not labelled "driver's license". If their vehicles are going around running people over, revoke whatever license it is that they have until they get it fixed.

[throwaway_tech]

As I said right before the statement you quoted:

>so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment

[stephencanon]

> obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company

Why not? This (suspending permission to operate on public roads) seems like a perfectly reasonable response to a self-driving car company being negligent.

[throwaway_tech]

As I replied to the first comment asking the same thing, the sentence preceding the statement you quoted explains what needs to be done:

>so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment

Police can't just make up traffic violations that don't currently exist and Courts can't begin dishing out punishments that don't exist for violations that don't exist.

[stephencanon]

Vehicles are certified as safe to operate on public roads by the (federal) government; that certification can be revoked by regulators. Many states have specific laws licensing self-driving cars to operate; the regulators in those states can also revoke permission. There's no need to invent violations.

[throwaway_tech]

>There's no need to invent violations.

I think the deceased and their family would disagree.

Sure there are existing regulations, but the idea is that as this new technology evolves and is being tested in the field we will find failures and create new regulations to govern.

Consider when the horseless carriage began replacing horse and buggy, traffic laws evolved over time as we realized we needed lanes, traffic signals, speed limits, etc...

Those laws continue to evolve to this day (ex.: red light cameras, ride-for-hire, etc...), to suggest new laws are not required for driver less vehicles and the current laws are sufficient, especially where we have driver-less vehicle death, suggests a serious disconnect with how law works.

[scarejunba]

They never actually used the stolen tech, right? It wasn't good enough. They hit the pedestrian solely on their own tech, which (clearly, in hindsight) wasn't good enough either.

[mikejb]

It wasn't disclosed on whether stolen IP was used - Uber had (still have?) to cooperate with Waymo, inspecting their hardware and software stack.

The pedestrian ultimately got hit because a lot of fallback systems failed: They disabled the software's ability to emergency-break (1), they disabled the cars' systems to emergency break, and the operator of the vehicle was distracted, not reacting in time.

(1) This was actually done due to false-positives, i.e. the car slamming on the breaks in non-emergency cases. (I find that's a relevant point, because without that detail it just sounds more ludicrous than it already is).

[close04]

The IP wasn't the problem in the accident, rather the implementation. Simplified, the software was tuned in favor of ignoring obstacles as false positives. By the time the system acknowledged the immediate danger it was too late. No tech, no matter how good the IP, could stand up to being tweaked like this.

And the emergency breaking relied on the human operator but the system was not designed to warn the operator.

[tempestn]

You want the car to brake in an emergency, definitely not to break.

[MrSandman]

It hasn’t even been decided if anything was stolen in the first place. It’s still in court. Only a civil trial has been settled.

[jstewartmobile]

perverse, yet not surprising