I’m not sure what someone’s status as a felon has with their ability to remain attentive, though. It’s not like they cut that part of your brain out when they convict you. Yes, it was stupid of her to not be paying attention, since that was literally her job. No, I don’t think that has anything to do with her being a felon, nor do I think a non-felon would be more likely to remain perfectly attentive. Uber apparently used to require two people be in the car together - one to monitor The Algorithm from the passenger seat, and the other to watch the road - but they dropped that requirement, presumably to double the number of miles they could get out of their available pool of safety drivers. A second passenger still may not have been able to prevent the collision, but a co-pilot keeping the safety driver honest and having the responsibility of monitoring the AI’s decision-making reports in real time certainly wouldn’t have hurt.
California requires companies to report within 10 days when an autonomous vehicle is involved in a traffic incident, as well as report annually on any circumstance in which the safety driver intervenes in the operation of the vehicle while in autonomous mode (section 227.50, pdf). Since everyone but Uber is operating under California’s rules, and there have been no news reports of safety drivers for Waymo, Google, Apple, or GM preventing those vehicles from careening into pedestrians, I think it’s safe to conclude that the safety driver is not some sort of thin blue line keeping autonomous vehicles from killing people on the regular.
