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By causing the vehicle to start operation, the driver accepted responsibility and liability, per the current laws on SDCs. Therefore, "scapegoat" is a misnomer that wrongly implies innocence or detachment from the sinful deed(s). The driver accepted her fate by signing up and settling into the left-hand front seat. I call bullshit. Why was the "SDC" even on the road? See, refusal to deal with this question is the attitude that increasingly pisses me off about tech companies. Oh, it's totally fine for me to deploy a multi-ton vehicle system with a "backup" operator that all human factors research reasonably tells us is going to be rendered unsafe by the levels of detachment induced by too good, but not good enough" levels of automation. Heaven forbid though that the company be ultimately culpable for the hazard they create. After all, they got an "independent contractor" to transfer risk onto. Likely one that poorly the nature, implementation, mechanics, and character of the system they were to supervise. Gotta exploit the opportunity for massive profit, while saddling someone else with all the bite of the risk, because conventional testing and sane operational practices (which includes not deploying shit you know is going to be unsafe) is toooooooooo expensive and too much to ask. Uber, apparently made the decision to deactivate the AEB system (likely because otherwise they couldn't convince anyone sane to ride in the car because they system wasn't ready). Uber decided to undertake risk transference to an independent contractor that, lets be real, every executive there knew they weren't going to have a great success rate at getting across the real operational envelope of these vehicles. The same exec team that brought you things like their networks kill switch to frustrate LE raids in other jurisdictions, and project Greyball, a system to gaslight LE in other jurisdictions as well. If anyone was "Jesus take the wheel"-ing that night, and every night leading up to it, it was Uber. But nah... We all sit back and accept these types of shenanigans as just "cost of doing business". It's "too important" to develop safely. |
Except in this particular case, the driver wasn't just zoned out, she was streaming Hulu. I don't think she was so lacking in free will that not having a stream on was out of her control.
>Uber, apparently made the decision to deactivate the AEB system (likely because otherwise they couldn't convince anyone sane to ride in the car because they system wasn't ready).
You're saying they disabled the AEB system, otherwise people wouldn't ride in the car? How does that make sense?