That quote is the crux of it when you pair it with this other section: "In addition, the operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review."
So you have a "driver" who has to be monitoring a diagnostic console, AND has to be separately watching for non-alerted emergency events to avoid a fatal crash? Why not hire two people? Good god.
Move fast and disable the brakes. They in fact began testing with two people per car, but then decided to go with just one. An Uber spokeswoman stated [1]:
> We decided to make this transition [from two to one] because after testing, we felt we could accomplish the task of the second person—annotating each intervention with information about what was happening around the car—by looking at our logs after the vehicle had returned to base, rather than in real time.
However, this seems to contradict the NTSB report which indicates that it still was the driver's responsibility to perform this event tagging task, which necessarily implies taking your eyes off the road.
"Uber moved from two employees in every car to one. The paired employees had been splitting duties — one ready to take over if the autonomous system failed, and another to keep an eye on what the computers were detecting. The second person was responsible for keeping track of system performance as well as labeling data on a laptop computer. Mr. Kallman, the Uber spokesman, said the second person was in the car for purely data related tasks, not safety."
"So you have a "driver" who has to be monitoring a diagnostic console, AND has to be separately watching for non-alerted emergency events to avoid a fatal crash?"
This gets your license yanked, herearound. Same goes for texting and driving if you're caught. Even in stop - go traffic.
So you have a "driver" who has to be monitoring a diagnostic console, AND has to be separately watching for non-alerted emergency events to avoid a fatal crash? Why not hire two people? Good god.