"Her defense team will argue she was checking Slack messages from Uber in her work phone at the time, whilst prosecutors will say she was watching an episode of reality show The Voice on her personal handset."

It doesn't really matter which, it matters whether either of these was considered acceptable whilst being the legally responsible driver in a vehicle.

If checking slack is something which was accepted, or even expected, by her employers then that is a serious issue.

She was a safety driver, not a systems engineers meant to be heads down doing other work whilst the vehicle was in motion.

Exactly. She was supposed to be driving, not ignoring everything in favour of burying her nose in her SmartPhone. It doesn't matter what she was doing on it, that she was *not* paying attention to the road is the crux of it all.

ClearView needs to be bitch slapped with a fine that will not just be a cost of doing business, it should be severe enough to make their bottom line bleed like a freshly butchered pig. A mere 20M is chump change. Turn that M into a B to make them take it seriously enough to not want to do it again. Turn it into a T to make their shareholders take down the entire C-level bunch of prats with pitchforks, burning tar, & bags of feathers.

Surely the crux of it all is that expecting humans to pay continuous and close attention to something that only relatively rarely requires them to actually *do* anything is, even at best, optimistic. It seems to me like the "safety driver" is only there to provide someone to blame who *isn't* the company claiming to be testing a "self driving car".

IMO, regardless of the situation, the company should be just as much on the hook for reponsibility as the "safety driver" employee. Because either the company hired someone not up to the task (i.e. the company's fault, as well as - possibly - the employee's for being negligent), or they gave the employee a job that couldn't be performed to an adequate standard (i.e. the company's fault).

Absolutely. On the one hand she's got no right to say she was "betrayed", she should have been paying attention. On the other hand, after you've been sitting behind the wheel doing nothing for hours and hours, after a while it's human nature to get a bit bored and trust that the thing is doing a good job of driving itself. (perhaps not if you are an engineer - but just a mere human).

Should we learn something from this, and put in some safety measures that make sure the "safety driver" is truly paying attention? Some combination of carrot and stick?

Perhaps if we asked them to actually drive the car? :-D

"Turn it into a T to make their shareholders take down the entire C-level bunch of prats with pitchforks, burning tar, & bags of feathers."

The shareholders are equally reprehensible for investing in this antisocial crap. Don't let them escape the the tar and feathers.

There's a long article on Vasquez and the accident at https://www.wired.com/story/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash/. Complicated situation. For example, Vasquez claims she was Listening to The Voice, not Watching it. And the pre-crash dash camera video might well support that. Listening to a broadcast seems OK and was also permitted by Uber's "driver's" rules. On the other hand, there is some reason that the authorities decided to charge her but not Uber, and I'd like to hear their side of the story.

BTW, the article does not reflect all that well on Uber. On the positive side, they did have rules and the cooperated in the investigation. On the other hand, it sounds like their "self-driving" software might be awful. Even worse than Tesla's -- assuming that is possible. And they disabled the vehicle's collision avoidance system which might have worked. And their system clearly was not designed with "If you must make mistakes, error on the side of safety" in mind.

"there is some reason that the authorities decided to charge her but not Uber"

That would be because at the time, she was legally in control of the vehicle.

What's the betting they told her it was a "self driving car" and she didn't have to "do anything" (especially not look at clause 475)

Reg readers probably all know otherwise, but I don't blame someone for thinking that a self driving car can drive itself.

Be nice to know how much training she got, if any.

Perhaps we need a driving licence for using self driving cars? And to stop calling them that, since they ain't and maybe maybe never will be.

Could it even be in the vaguest realms of possibility that they would deliberately put someone in their car and instruct them or misguide them as to the level of interaction required, knowing that this was a likely outcome and that, in fact, what their "experiment" was intended to do was not so much to test the car but to test the legal system?

You must not have see the video screen shots that were released. That date where she says that everyone went from supporting her to hating her was, in fact, the day the images were relesed showing her staring down at the phone in her lap. If she was only listening to The Voice its only because her phone was in split-screen mode and she was sending a text message.

According to the Wired story -- which may not be an unbiased source. What she was looking down at was her work phone on the console which was displaying work related slack messaging. (Seems to me like a bad idea BTW. If reading messages while driving really is part of the job, surely the phone should be mounted on the dash or in the upper left corner of the windshield). According to Wired, her personal phone showing/playing The Voice was on the passenger seat. And -- according to Wired -- the dash video shows her reaching over there to get the phone to dial 911 after the accident.

I remember seeing the video of the crash when it first happened.

Yes the driver didn't have her eyes on the road, but on the camera footage I couldn't see the pedestrian until the last second. Blink and you're too late.

My conclusion at the time was that the woman and bicycle were clearly in the wrong, and that that type of accident must happen all the time without anyone being sent to jail.

Uber or any other self-driving test organisation should be obliged to take out a special insurance to pay big money to anyone who manages to get hit by one of their cars. That would make them more risk aware..

"the woman and bicycle were clearly in the wrong"

*sarcasm* Obviously deserved a death sentence then. */sarcasm*

In order to assert that accidents of that type must happen all the time, you have to ascertain how may incidents of that type don't become accidents of that type due to the presence and active response of a reasonably vigilant driver.

It would be impossible to prove beyond any doubt that had the driver been paying attention, the outcome of the event would have been different. It is similarly impossible to prove that it wouldn't have been any different.

It would be even harder to determine if the the driver HAD been paying attention that they would have taken action to avoid the outcome, seeing as though they were in a vehicle that supposedly would avoid such incidents of its own volition. In a way, I wish that this was in fact the case being tested. This will be an easy one... she wasn't paying attention, she didn't see the woman, she's liable. The harder case, and the one that puts the ball firmly in the court of the developer, is if the driver HAD seen the woman but the vehicle's control system either hadn't the sensor data to label it or if it had, that the vehicle's system would have taken avoidance action about it. How's a supervising driver supposed to know if something has been detected or not and if it has, how has it been classified? It's all well and good showing these videos of objects with green cuboids around them and vector arrows attached to them, but these aren't displayed in the vehicle, are they?! Superimposed over all the windows to show what the vehicle's view of the world is? We don't get to see a stream of machine code down the side labelling the possible responses and highlighting the selected response.

You've clearly got to have no fear or respect for your own life, let alone anyone else's to sit in a self drive car without being the slightest bit worried about what's going on outside. Or she was too trusting of the technology, which is an equally insane state of mind.

This is entirely her fault so far as I'm concerned. You're sat there in a moving vehicle and you're meant to intervene if things go wrong. You can't do that if you can't be bothered to look anywhere but your phone.

Don't really don't get this one, you don't have time in combat to make decision making protracted so usually the army has very clear hierarchy such discussions usually end with yes sarg or sir not lets boot my laptop and see what the AI thinks once everything is entered in.

"Hello Dave, how can I help you today?"

"I see. You want me to advise on how best to attack that advancing tank."

"I must advise you Dave that there is only a 37.2 per cent chance of completing this conversation before the tank is on top of you."

"Would you like me to sing Daisy Daisy to take your mind off the pain of having been run over?"

"Dave?"

If you are infantry in a proper foxhole, you're supposed to let the tank run over you. That lets you either attack its more vulnerable areas or attack the infantry supporting the tank. That is, if the Russians sent in supporting infantry with their tanks....

Sarg? where is the option to tick if there isn't a foxhole?

Sarge: You go out and have a look!

Grunt: No way! I'll probably get shot.

Sarge: Let's ask the AI

AI: You both go

[calculates: one will come back, wages will be reduced, savings made on rations]

Same applies when going to the doctors. Doc will give you a prescription based on cost /benefit across the whole population. It's your own responsibility to see it that maximises your own utility.

It's usually worth trying alternative medicine (é.g diet change, hippie shit) because it's cheap and does not have contraindications with the drugs Doc gave you (you should take these, natch). Usually worth seeing if there are other relevant drugs which don't have contraindications and taking them too.

We seem to be stuck in a foxhole in the ground underneath a giant tank that we can't possibly move with no hope of rescue. Does the AI battle computer have anything to say about that?

Yeah. There's bound to be something... Just got to fill in the right... Ah! Here it is...

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a foxhole in the ground underneath a giant tank you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

It's about time we did something about that AI.

Clippy goes to war? Doesn't sound promising.

> Clippy goes to war? Doesn't sound promising.

It looks like you're trying to order a man to his death. Can I help you with that?

It says, "... March 2018. Now nearly three years later ..."

The past few years have been very disorientating and I'm not sure the months in lockdown really count but technically, about four years have passed since March 2018.

> Finally, the agency will consult legal counsel and experts in ethics

Ah yes, spend the time and money, and only *then* worry about whether it's legal. (I expect that the "experts in ethics" bit is dry humor.)

"At first everybody was all on my side, even the chief of police."

Yup that's pretty typical for a driver running down pedestrians and people on bikes. Officer will take the motorist's statement while the person on the ground is wheeled off to the hospital or morgue. Won't even take the statement of a survivor before filing the paperwork. Might even go on camera to advocate on the driver's behalf. For the victims the burden of proof is often on them, and often requires media coverage to generate enough outrage for a real investigation to occur.

Also, since the universal rule is "don't talk to the police, because they see it as their job to get you to confess to everything" I have to wonder if the Chief of Police was actually on her side of it just felt that way while they talked in hopes of getting her to say something they could later use against her in court.

-> Vasquez's side of the story is a tragic, personal tale

Even more tragic for the person who was killed, who in this report is merely 'a woman'. Nameless.

I thought the GDPR was EU-wide so if they are fined in Italy for breaching it then they can't do any business elsewhere in the EU without paying up?

Clearview AI was fined €20m ($21.8m) by Italy's data protection watchdog for unlawfully scraping selfies

Lucky they just got $30M in extra funding [1] last October . /sarc

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/14/ukraine-clearview-facial-recognition-war/

Am I the only one to think of that [1]ultimate weapon used - or not used - by The Doctor?

M.

[1] https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Moment

"It will be difficult for Italy's data security agency to force the company to pay up, but the decision could deter Italian companies from using Clearview's software."

GDPR has options for holding officers of the company responsible. I think an extradition request for the CEO, CFO and directors for non-payment of the fine would produce quick results.

Any vehicle manufacturer that claims self / autonomous driving abilities is clearly defrauding.

None of them can be trusted. All require a pilot. So what good are they ? Ill take the wheel..

Well your victim is dead.

Who is worse off, again ?

Cry me a river. I was never on your side. You were THE DRIVER.

YOU were responsible.

It's time to own up to that.