What about the 'safety' driver who paid no attention to the road until after the impact? The dash cam video showed them messing with their phone for the entire duration. They were legally in charge of, and driving, the vehicle. Much as I hate to throw the lowest member of the pecking order under a bus, this was absolutely their responsibility.

I'm confused why more people here aren't calling the driver out on this.

My understanding is that Uber knows these cars aren't ready and that's why they have a human at the controls.

I would have thought the driver would be instructed to maintain awareness of the road as though he were operating the vehicle and that looking away from the road in a manner that suggests he was using his phone would immediately relieve Uber of any responsibility.

Perhaps the collision still would have happened, but at least the driver would have the defence of "I was paying attention and meeting all the job-role requirements as safety-operator of the vehicle."

If the driver was paying attention but was unable to react in time, then I'd expect the same result as any other time that a commercial driver on public roads is involved in a fatal accident: Some kind of investigation, and if no fault is found, everyone shrugs and it's forgotten because shit happens.

The fault is with Uber because their software should have been able to use LIDAR to detect the person walking in the road.

Yep.

Typically the employee would be criminally negligent, and the employer would be civilly liable. Uber's $20B is a legal war chest, so this was fully anticipated.

you all keep calling it 'safety driver' but it was for all the intended purposed since the beginning of this fray the 'scapegoat driver'

This is frustrating, and we've just begun seeing these fatal car accidents done by self-driving cars.

These things and liability should have been decided before the cars were allowed on the road. But when Congress deregulated them at the federal level everyone hailed it as a good thing and completely ignored all the potential negatives of that.

Now, even if Uber is found guilty, it may get away with it, because there may be no law clearly attributing guilt to a self-driving car maker in case of accidents like these.

I think that by the letter of the law, liability would be strictly with the "safety driver" (aka scapegoat on duty). They were surely told to keep attentive all the time and - surprise - it did not happen.

The root cause, in my opinion, is allowing cars on the road that inevitably lull their nominal driver into inattentiveness.

There might be ways to keep a safety driver engaged so that the chance of attention failure is significantly lower than inevitable, but it doesn't seem like Uber had been looking for them very hard.

It's not a unique situation. Developers are responsible for software that kills.

This is idealistic, but generally, it should go up to the boss. Either the lead of the self-driving unit or the CEO of Uber. It's their responsibility to make sure the software is ready before testing it on the streets. They get paid a huge salary exactly because of the responsibility this is.

Seems like there should be some kind of legal process for figuring this out. People have died from faulty software before.

(Someone went to jail for VW and there was no death directly as a result of the emissions cheating.)

There were dozens of statistical deaths caused by all that increased particulate pollution. Air pollution is not harmless and it does reduce people's lifespans.

Statistical deaths from pollution are weird though, in that you are perfectly fine legally as long as you pollute within the accepted threshold. Driving 50 miles in a car that pollutes twice the allowed amount somehow makes you responsible for fractional statistical deaths in a way that driving 100 miles in a car that pollutes the allowed amount does not.

This observation does in no way absolve the polluters, but the big picture would be incomplete without this perspective. We all have some blood from statistical deaths in our hands, some people more than others, and again some of them more than others because they broke some rules we introduced to make the deaths not run or of bounds.

But VW was not polluting within the accepted threshold. They were very specifically defrauding regulators to try to get away with polluting far beyond the accepted threshold.

(Someone went to jail for VW and there was no death directly as a result of the emissions cheating.)

That was an instance of deliberate fraud.

The developer’s boss(es) seems more useful in this case. Unless a single developer was grossly negligent, then throw them in there too, but even then their supervisors are on the hook for signing off on grossly negligent software.

Yes, the developer.

What if the developer had sent an email to their boss saying "hey I think this is a bad idea" and their boss pushed it anyway? What if there is an open bug report that the developer intends to fix, but management won't give them the free hours to do it?

Then it's up to courts to take that into account. This is not a completely alien situation on Mars; it decomposes into manageable problems, some of which have been solved previously.

I'd argue that prosecuting a developer because his employer used his code to kill someone would be comparable to prosecuting a gun manufacturer because a customer used their weapon to kill someone.

This is comparable to prosecuting the developer who works for a gun manufacturer when a new type of digital "safety" fails.

An equally fair comparison. I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I'm really just spit-balling for discussion's sake and because I consider it interesting; please do poke holes in my reasoning.

Presumably the developer in this scenario is not responsible for guaranteeing to and/or misleading a customer that his code adequately renders a deadly weapon safe, more likely that responsibility falls on the managers whose project it was to implement such a digital "safety" and instructed the developer to write the code in the first place.

Assuming the developer did not write the code with the intent of bringing about a person's death, which might involve fooling his superiors as to the efficacy of his work, I'd wager he can't be guilty of a crime. Outside of that, I believe vicarious liability applies.

Perhaps he was a one-man department of this hypothetical gun manufacturer, implementing, deploying, and marketing his product himself and of his own initiative; I don't think there's any doubt he'd be liable in this case, the extent of which is dependent on his intention.

Perhaps our developer was self-employed as a contractor, and warranted to his client (the hypothetical gun manufacturer) that the code was safe; assuming the manufacturer used it as warranted, and it failed, I'd assume the developer would be mostly liable for the result.

Gun companies are a bad analogy because they are one of the only exceptions to having legal liability when their products kill people. Almost every other industry can be held liable if their product kills someone.

Ahh, I wasn't aware of that.

What about heavy machinery, like construction plant? Or power tools? Or common kitchen utensils? Would they satisfy the analogy?