Every NTSB report has a "probable cause" section determining who or what was at fault. And then the FAA hands out fines and courts award additional damages largely based on that finding.
It is true that the punishments aren't handled by the NTSB but that's more about separation of concerns & departmental remits than anything else. Is separating out "fault finding" from "punishments" a good idea? Maybe? I honestly don't know.
In case everyone is not aware, NTSB reports cannot be used in court to establish fault or otherwise be used as evidence when seeking compensation for damages.
"No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report." 49 USC 1154(b)
In criminal cases what happens with inadmissible evidence? Like fruit of poisonous tree doctrine... what if you literally have video proof and tons of other graphic proof of a murder, you really just ignore it and let the perp go back into society?
It would be nice if society adopted this with all crimes. It's not like we can prove we're any different than the low level design of a machine; when it comes to the "free will" ideology currently the justice system is designed around.
To a large extent we already do that, e.g. many countries have upper limit in punishment (like 30 years jail max), or allow criminals to delete their criminal past after some time has passed, not because that "just" or "fair" or whatever, but simply because it's "effective".
The distinctions our legal system makes regarding coercion, mens rea, insanity, etc are mostly trying to get at this same underlying distinction.
"Whoa, there sure are a lot of fights at bars we have to keep responding to! Maybe those would happen less if we had fines for bartenders that had too many fights? Or maybe if they had to get a license that we could revoke if they weren't preventing fights?"
"Whoa, it seems that a lot of people don't own guns, but then go and buy one when they get pissed and shoot somebody. Maybe that would happen less if we had waiting periods?"
And I just realized you're being downvoted. How surprising.
I don't think it is because in this case the person was hired by Uber specifically to "drive" this car. They knew that the car is still an incomplete product, they knew that they were testing it, they knew that they were literally getting paid to keep this car from doing something like this.
That's very different than a random person using a self-driving car that they expect and were told is a finished product.
Sadly, while that is in fact the task of the safety drivers in other automated car trials it wasn't the case here for uber, because the "safety driver" was given both the job of safety driving and of checking, controlling and classifying the automated system's information, ensuring they'd have to split their focus and would need to frequently context-switch between two completely different tasks.
Worse, this decision of Uber all but ensured this would happen: the automation system is more likely to lose its shit and need checking specifically in situations where the safety driver would be most useful.
My point was only that I don't think this would set any kind of precedent since it's so far from a simple case of "an owner of a self driving car".
Not watching TV while you’re supposed to be driving is a pretty low bar.
But apparently, humans can’t even be relied on to do this, even when it’s their one single job.
There are decades of experiments showing that boredom and fatigue are huge problems for this kind of work where someone is mostly idle except for rare events. It’s why the TSA mixes fake images into the stream on X-ray scans so people see things regularly and don’t zone out. Anyone smart asking humans to do repetitive work builds layers of safeguards in to keep people engaged – or in Uber’s case they just hope they can shift blame to the person in a bad design, which worked so far.
What we have here is someone who was watching TV on the job. I adamantly refuse to believe that humans are incapable of not watching TV for a stretch of several hours.
If the driver had nodded off, looked out with glazed over eyes, or any number of other situations consistent with your scenario, then you'd have a point. But this was not that case.
The fact that this particular person dealt with boredom by watching a video makes it easier to blame but that's just one of many ways in which people cope with boredom and it's not the root cause. You can blame the worker if it makes you feel better about yourself but if your goal is to reduce the number of errors the system has to be redesigned not to depend on people acting like robots rather than humans.
> Of the millions of self driving car test miles with safety drivers not once has a safety driver been looking at the road, but not able to react in time because of the monotony of the job.
Do you have any evidence supporting this claim? In particular, you'd need to prove that all of the self-driving car tests have the same one-person setup (which we know to be incorrect), every company ignored decades of well-understood risks and similarly didn't have any tasks for that person to perform and thus stay engaged, and you'd need to know how frequently incidents occur which require driver action to prevent a problem.
It's far more likely to be the case that there have been many situations where someone was distracted or focused on an area other than where a potential risk was but the other driver or the self-driving system successfully avoided it turning into an incident which made the news.
It's way more active than watching a self-driving car doing it's thing completely autonomously.
What if we came up with a reasonably objective test of driver skill and the car outperforms you?
This is and remains the standard argument - the car doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to beat a human having a bad day. If you are worried about the liability, maybe keep the car serviced and sit in the drivers seat and look out of the window instead of watching a movie. Tell the car to dive slowly maybe.
I feel sorry for the driver who is creating this precedent, but this is hardly a road block. The average human is not a great driver.
I wonder why would a programmer go and work on a code when he is always in danger of going to prison for every mistake he makes. We all know that bugs in software happen and it’s impossible to write bug free code
The go-to counterexample is the code that ran on the space shuttle, which took years and hundreds of people and $200 million to produce. I have been told that nobody has ever found a bug in the final production system. The development practices involved in creating it seem like they would make most software engineers want to curl up and die. One tidbit from the following link I found is that 60 people spent years working on the backup flight control system, intended to never be used!
This cop out of "Software gonna have bugs" as a way to evade all liability doesnt hold in any other profession. I dont see why we get special treatment here.
Nobody calls the emergency services out because they assume cars are going to crash and plan accordingly, so why does the software engineering industry get called out for assuming software will go wrong and planning accordingly?
You don't go to prison for "mistakes", you go to prison for criminal negligence.
Given that you can go to prison for criminal negligence in any other profession (e.g. a dentist who exposes thousands of people to HIV), why would programmers be the one category of job that's exempt from criminal laws?
The difference between the two is what a politically-motivated prosecutor can convince a jury of.
The hypothetical gullibility of juries doesn't mean that we shouldn't have laws against murder, juries, or prosecutors.
Fail fast!
...sorry for the sarcasm but this is a message student engineers internalize in part because it is pushed by companies they want to work for but can't explain why. They don't have strong boundaries between why it might he a justifiable philosophy for Facebook but not for Boeing.
But in response to your comment, engineers have a very clearly defined set of rules, collectively called "the code". As long as they design to them you'll be free of criminal negligence (at least during the design & development phase, things get a little murkier in construction).
More to the point, engineering for the real-world means layer upon layer of uncertainty. e.g. civil/structural engineers use materials we can't model (we use pretty-good approximations for concrete behavior) in conditions which are unknown (soil) to resist forces we can't predict (weather, earthquakes, dynamic response to loading). How does the code deal with all this uncertainty? Slap safety-factor after safety-factor onto everything. Whoever comes up with a method for more effectively dealing with this stuff will make millions.
The most obvious example being that we design structures to resist a 1-in-100 year storm. In other words, we expect a structure to be within spitting distance of failure every hundred years. But as long as you design to that standard, you're fine.
I don't believe they all ask for incredible amounts of compensation
Also, the software world doesn't have the benefit of millennia of accumulated best practices.
Finally, the senior engineers and architects who are licensed to sign off on things they will be held criminally liable for do get incredible amounts of compensation as compared to their more junior colleagues.
On the other hand, a minor screwup in software is far more likely to cause catastrophic failure because we just don't know how to workably build large, robust systems out of code.
Nit: meeting the requirements of law isn't barely collapsing; that requirement has so many safety factors built-in because the building code has to approximate so much. The approach isn't that dissimilar from how that "anybody" you mention would build their bridge that doesn't fall down: by guessing safely.
Effectively, they test things to destruction, then publish minimum requirements. So if you want to pressurise your reactor vessel to reactor vessel to 30 atmospheres, you can pretty much look up a table that'll tell you precisely how thick the reactor walls need to be for each of the commonly used materials. If you want to use something uncommon, then you need to pay somebody to test it.
If it fails in a catastrophic fashion, you can expect to be asked to show that you did your due diligence, and there are extenuating circumstances a reasonable engineer could not have been expected to foresee and plan for. Or that you did foresee it, and somebody else chose to accept the (clearly defined) risk.
Volvo's acceptance of liability seems little more than a smart business decision- the cost of an insurance payout to the family of the deceased is less than the money they stand to earn in profit from selling autonomous vehicles. We can't allow this generous actuarial calculation to absolve the operator of such a vehicle of responsibility too. If you don't like it, take the train.
It's similar to the situation with companies like Google blocking people who have no easy way to get support, except more morbid.
I'm not fond of living in such a world where personal responsibility is dissolved and becomes meaningless.
This is something that I really don't like about our society, the fact that someone "must" take be responsible. When someone goes on a shooting spree, of course they should go to jail. But if they die in the process of committing their crime, there is almost always an outcry for the next person in line to be responsible.
We have rules about motor vehicle operation. The operator is responsible. If you are the passenger in the back seat of a cab, the driver is responsible, not the passenger. If there is nobody else and you are the pilot of an autonomous vehicle, you have to assume responsibility for your vehicle and its actions.
If you bought a faulty gun with a broken safety catch, and waved it around in a crowded street, and it fired, killing someone, you should be held personally liable. You brought the gun out in public and created the scenario which caused someone to be hurt by it.
Looking at the fuel line question through that lens: did the leak start while you were driving and you were completely unaware? Or has it been leaking for a while and you just haven't gotten around to fixing it.
With the ammunition, how was it stored? Was it dumped in a toolbox filled with pointy screws? (A reasonably prudent person ought to know that ammunition is fired by striking the primer with a sharp object). Was it stored in the front seat of the car on the hottest day of summer? (A reasonably prudent person would expect it to get really hot in there)
Etc. Etc. The thing about negligence is that there's a lot of room for interpretation. As another example, if you've been driving a car around with self-driving features, and you've experienced it behaving erratically multiple times, and that's followed by an accident... you knew or ought to have known that it was dangerous to be on the road in that vehicle. If there was an OTA update for the autopilot last night that installed silently, and it results in a crash, then it's probably the manufacturer who's liable.
It seems to me that it would be the benefit of self-driving car companies to own up to liability as it is to their benefit of achieving widespread adoption. For example, Volvo is in line with this idea and has publicly stated that they would accept full liability in fully autonomous operation modes[0].
In this case, I do think that some liability lies with the driver - as they were tasked specifically with prevent situations like this. What is not clear is whether or not this task is even humanly feasible given reaction times, and based off of this, whether or not Uber has been criminally negligible. Given this, I am surprised that the prosecutor seems to have absolved Uber of any blame.
[0] https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...