The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more? That's what the arbitrators concluded.

But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

Yes the driver made a poor decision in a situation that he was not trained for. However enrolling and onboarding the driver is a part of Uber's process. The situation may have been avoided if Uber had this strict clause in its onboarding manual to never stop the car or drop the passenger at unsafe spot. The driver and rider are bound by the Uber negotiated contract atleast until the end of ride.

On the driverless cars, the chances are that the companies would come up with some innovative legal clause to add to their terms and services to avoid taking any liability from the driverless car's action.

This sounds about right. When Uber's driverless car killed someone they got off pretty easy:

*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]

0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

> The bad guy here is the driver.

We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.

Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.

I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.

> The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more?

Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".

And surely the DMV has far greater 'vicarious liability', as they're the ones that issue licenses.

There was no world in which driverless cars weren't the eventual outcome anyway.

And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.

They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.

A company is liable for the actions of its workers whether they are W2 employees or 1099 independent contractors. That distinction governs the relationship between the worker and the company, not the company and its customers.

A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.

Uber is bad too for not training drivers to not do something like this.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility... the simplest thing is...

To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.

Every other answer is bullshit.

Do you expect that Waymo will not take responsibility for the driverless car?

Cars are an amazing way to shift liability around. Try to start your own rail line, good luck. Have 10,000 drivers with 10,000 accidents? no problem.

[dead]

You all realize that when AI takes everyone's jobs the only way people will survive is by pledging allegiance to AI companies so they feed and house them right? Its not going to lead to some utopia where people are free to paint and write novels all day. People will basically become slaves to these companies.

I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.

There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.

But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.