Is that enough?

I think it's very clear that a human driving a normal vehicle is different from a human sitting at the wheel of a self-driving (semi-self-driving?) vehicle. You simply cannot expect a human to remain as engaged and attentive in such a passive situation.

It's baffling to me that they chose to deactivate emergency braking without substituting a driver alert. If the false-positives are so frequent as to render the alert useless (i.e. it's going off all the time and you ignore it) I don't think these vehicles are suitable for on-road testing.

You can lean fairly heavily on the 'still dangerous, but better' argument in the face of 40,000 US vehicle fatalities each year, but there are limits.

Except it’s patently clear that is a flawed concept. Here’s a prime example where a human, not paying attention because the car has been successfully driving for a while, is given 1-2 seconds to emergency stop the car. That is not enough time to process what’s going on and take over. Even 10 seconds is likely not enough.

Worse, under Uber's regime the one human had to deal with both emergency situations (without warnings from the system) and instrumentation feedback (without a HUD), so the intended operation of this test was that the safety driver spends half the time looking down and away from the road.

And they also ran tests at night. This is not an obstacle for the LIDAR but is an extra challenge for the human.

Yeah, and it is also why they had a driver facing camera to insure that driver's were taking this responsibility seriously.

It seems that Uber wasn't actually verifying that, though.

The driver was also in charge of monitoring and classifying/tagging instruments messages appearing on monitors on the center stack.

I doubt the camera can give you a good idea of whether or not the 'driver' starts to daydream. They could be looking at the road and not paying attention. Worse, the 'driver' could be unaware they aren't paying attention, rendering their intention to stay alert moot.

Of course that is possible, but in this case the driver was clearly not looking ahead. I guess it is possible that this was the first time the driver did that, but I think that is unlikely.

Maybe he was just making a statement.