Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out.

Don't take a boring job if you can't handle it. The required basic level of continued attention is not a superhuman skill. It's not a job for everyone but it's not exceptional at all.

> Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out.

Driving a truck is in no way comparable to what this lady was tasked to do. A truck driver is performing an active task (operating a truck), this lady was supposed to be performing a passive task (monitoring a truck's driving). Active and passive tasks are very different beasts.

But you're on to something with your comparison to pilots. Planes are mostly automated. When that automation fails, the pilots often lack the situational awareness to avoid a crash when they have to take over (for an example, see https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...).

I don't think this distinction is morally meaningful. Do passive monitoring tasks require more discipline? Probably. Are you unable to perform them? Get another job.

How many times do you think this driver was distracted with the phone when doing their job? I bet it wasn't just this one time that they happened to crash.

Pilots crash after hours of boredom because debugging problems in the air is hard, not because they were negligent leading up to the problem (vast majority of the time, anyway). And still by and large they succeed, it just goes unreported in the news because business-as-usual. This driver on the other hand got into an unrecoverable situation because of their own behaviour.

Except they're not driving, they're just watching as the car drives itself. Driving implies you are perform actions in response to the environment, these people do not, they simply sit and watch.

Not even remotely the same thing.

Dude was paid to pay attention. He didn't. It wasn't because he got fatigued, it was because he was deliberately doing something else, by choice

Yes, but no. The point that was trying to be made was that he was hired for a task that's fundamentally extremely difficult for humans. You can pay a person all you want to stare at paint drying so they can note down the exact moment it's perfectly dry, but don't be surprised when they do a poor job.

The guy screwed up. Uber knew he almost certainly would. I won't say the guy isn't responsible at all, but pretending this is purely on him and Uber bears 0% of the responsibility is just silly. Humans are not capable of anything and everything simply because they are provided pay.

My point was that what the driver did was not negligence, it was deliberate inattention.

If she had been negligent, i.e., too tired to notice the pedestrian, that would have been a different matter. If she had been paying attention most of the time but inadvertently reached over to drink some coffee, that would have been a different matter.

But she wasn't too tired, and she wasn't momentarily reaching for a drink; she was simply choosing not to pay attention to her job so she could do something else instead.

You're still missing what I'm trying to say, I think. I'm not talking about fatigue, or brief inattention, or anything like that.

I'm saying that the inattention was basically a given. Yeah, at some point the driver went and grabbed a phone. It may have been fiddling with junk in the car, or their fingers, or day dreaming to the extent they were unaware of the world around them.

Yeah, they grabbed a phone. Is that really any different from any of the above? I don't think so. Particularly considering how ingrained the reflex is to grab and fiddle with a phone when bored is. I wouldn't be surprised if they never consciously decided to pick the thing up.

The task was simply unreasonable. Uber should have foreseen this problem and implemented systems to aide and monitor their drivers.

although I agree Uber bears most of the responsibility the analogy was ridiculous in not being fundamentally extremely difficult but basically impossible.

Aside from this, if the car had been driving over the speed suitable for the conditions at the time the fall person had plenty of time to note that and take over, in that case it was more like huh, the paint is drying but it looks like it's going to rain .... long time looking like it's going to rain ... oh no should have put the covers on!

But I'm betting the need to take over and drive is not properly given to the fall person either.

When people are bored they get distracted and do other things. This is well known human nature and very few people are suited to this sort of task. The people who set up the self-driving car should have known better than the uneducated poor person who is being sacrificed.

She could always just take a break if she felt her attention was lacking. Or you know, not take the job in the first place if this job was so hard for her personally.

It is not at all fair to make the comparison you are making.