> They shouldn't have been driving in public with someone who wasn't paying attention 100% of the time as any regular driver would.
It's pretty well known that humans' minds wander, that it happens more when monitoring reliable systems for rare problems, and that it makes operators less responsive and lowers their error detection rate [1] - as anyone who's attended a boring meeting or lecture can attest!
I'm not sure that anyone informed would imagine a worker spending 40 hours a week monitoring a self-driving car would be able to watch it with 100% attention.
The truth is nobody realistic expects the safety driver to respond to reliably prevent an accident like this - they're there for slower-developing problems, resetting false alarm stops, and taking the blame.
That's why two tests drivers makes sense in the early days and not keeping extended hours.
Companies like https://comma.ai/ are taking a much better approach IMO by keeping it simple by first perfecting lane assist/highway driving + building a driver watching device which alerts them when they stop paying attention for x amount of time. Which Uber should be investing in for their test drivers.
Another important thing is being realistic about expectations, of course 100% paying attention is unrealistic even for normal drivers, accidents will happen regardless. Hitting jaywalkers on a dark multi-lane high speed road is a lot less bad than other possible scenarios and there really hasn't been that many accidents yet.
It's pretty well known that humans' minds wander, that it happens more when monitoring reliable systems for rare problems, and that it makes operators less responsive and lowers their error detection rate [1] - as anyone who's attended a boring meeting or lecture can attest!
I'm not sure that anyone informed would imagine a worker spending 40 hours a week monitoring a self-driving car would be able to watch it with 100% attention.
The truth is nobody realistic expects the safety driver to respond to reliably prevent an accident like this - they're there for slower-developing problems, resetting false alarm stops, and taking the blame.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633607/