> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Lets not act like it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that FSD cars on existing public roads will exist.
In my opinion, safe FSD cars are not possible with current technology on existing public roads - so either the technology has to improve by orders of magnitude, or the roads need to be modified significantly.
The gung-ho experimentation that is going on in public is in my opinion very dangerous and should be stopped, and this case is a perfect example of why.
Both the road infrastructure and other drivers are too crappy and unpredictable for FSD cars to be viable and safe.
Also this business of holding someone who is not actually controlling the vehicle accountable is ridiculous, and is surely something which will be proven in court eventually.
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.