Unlike Uber, Waymo has always said they do not believe (based on data and experience) "safety drivers" are a realistic safety measure, because normal human beings do not have the ability to concentrate hard on a task for 8 hours a day that they have absolutely no control/feedback upon.
If this is not obvious to you, you have never tried doing such a task. Try it and you will change your mind immediately.
I believe the safety drivers are primarily responsible for getting the autonomous cars to resume driving again after they've stopped for some unknown reason, not to react in a fraction of a second to divert a disaster.
In theory, as is obvious from all these comment threads, people seem to think the "safety drivers" (think about that name...) are there to actually, like, you know, improve safety.
That's the stated goal, I believe. I also believe that the actual task is "scapegoat." I sure hope the people taking this job offer are at least aware of this.
It could be done; they could drive in shorter shifts, and they could have automation like some high end cars that detect eyes off the road or off the wheel. I guess the main issue is that it would be expensive.
I agree with that actually. The task /as defined now/ is impossible for a human, but yes, actually designing it for human psychology would make it better. A great idea I saw on another comment thread was to keep safety drivers busy by giving them a task like labelling objects on the road as pedestrians, cars etc. Even if it is not that useful, it means their eyes will be on the road when it counts. I mean, we all do that when we do normal driving on boring roads, don't we, try to become more observant, count silly things, to fight boredom?
Pretty sure Uber doesn't give a damn and they see the safey drivers as window dressing. My bayesian gut tells me it's more likely the safety driver program is systemically weak, not that this guy was a huge outlier.
