>Also, has anyone here talked about the effect on the eyes of watching a (typically) bright white screen vs letting them adjust to the light of the night yet? This point deserves to be brought up.

Using bright interior lighting at night is something that we've known not to do for more than a century. If the driver couldn't be expected to see the pedestrian because the interior lighting or UX was too bright that is not something that does not reflect favorably upon Uber.

I wonder if the driver is liable.

That's their only purpose. Nobody in their right mind could expect human observers to stay as alert as an actual driver when cruising for days with an AI that is good enough to not require interventions all the time. Passengers add nothing to safety, and an almost reliable AI will make anyone a passenger after a short while.

Completely agreed, but the law needs to take this into account. Human psychology can't just be ignored on this.

I'd like to have an interior view of what driver was actually looking at. It couldn't have been a FLIR monitor, for sure.. it seems more likely to be a phone held in the right hand? Bit hard to tell with the quality of the footage, but driver looked rather tired to boot.

If so (a hand held phone), in Australia that driver would be going to jail for culpable driving causing loss of life.

It could have been anything readable. I got the feeling it was either a Kindle or something like that or maybe even a hardcopy of something printed or written on paper. This was just a hunch but I think it's being validated in my mind by the fact that there was no light seeming to shine on the driver's face but that's probably due to the night vision camera not picking up that type of light? I don't really know. My mind is filling in a lot of gaps here, I realize.

EDIT: Upon re-watching the video a third time and really paying attention to this I don't think there is any real way for us to know without confirmation from the driver them self or an official report on the incident. My mind was definitely deciding things that just aren't discover-able from the video itself.

Here we have it, I believe:

"Uber also developed an app, mounted on an iPad in the car’s middle console, for drivers to alert engineers to problems. Drivers could use the app anytime without shifting the car out of autonomous mode. Often, drivers would annotate data at a traffic light or a stop, but many did so while the car was moving"

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-d...

The whole project seemed designed for an outcome like this. Eg allowing app to be used whilst on the move, after reducing from 2 to 1 operators. Culpability ought to lie with Uber.

Here's a picture of the Uber car from inside. No FLIR, just GPS:

https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Front-_-...

A different picture from that article shows that under the GPS is the gear stick, an emergency button, and a cellphone charger.

According to the filename, those are iPads, which implies they could have been displaying anything (not just GPS).

I think he is, at least, I've never heard of any law that removes responsibility from a driver if driving a self-driving car. I think this will also apply to empty cars, if they get into an accident, the owner is liable.

If I recall correctly the military has done a lot of studies on this.