So Uber ToS requires you to accept arbitration, then, when they are found responsible for damages, they still don’t want to pay. Seems pretty shitty for the consumer.
Moreso it’s them whining about losing when and trying to add a non-disparagement clause at $10m per event to the settlement for even factual information relating to the case.
Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.
Forced arbitration is creating a parallel legal system where certain companies are excluded from the consequences of their own actions. One might even say they’re becoming a protected class even.
Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
In general, most issues are being redirected to forced arbitration and not enough people can or effort to sue these companies, so in actual effect, they’re immune one might say.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
We all know the talking points from big corporations about why they force everyone into arbitration out of the goodness of their hearts. We don't need it regurgitated as if it's the truth.
> Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.
Arbitration is fine. There's no reason people shouldn't be allowed to freely engage the services of an arbitrator.
What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.
> Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given ADR a go first.
“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.
And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.
Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).
Louis Rossman does not take sponsorships, and turns off ads for his videos as much as YouTube allows. His videos are for his opinions, not making money.
Mr Rossman will literally tell you to use an ad-blocker to watch his videos and refuses to take sponsorships, actively does not want money from making YouTube videos and just wants to get the word out. I'd agree with you if it was literally any other creator.
Two things can be true at once, especially when talking about people’s behaviour. I don’t know this guy from atom, but if he’s a YouTuber then my instinct is to not trust him.
No, you would say it needs to be reformed and funded, we have an extremely legalistic society that allows endless delaying and does not fund its core services very well.
Food for thought (not specifically relevant to this case): I wonder how much would go away if the US had universal healthcare, or to put it another way, how much of its legal system is spent figuring out who pays for medical treatment
What's the line? If 2 brothers sign a contract, can't they decide their father will be the judge if disputes arise?
If there's a sports match, shouldn't the sports arbiter be able to decide whether some team scored a goal or not?
These are all valid civil contracts. It only affects the civil claims, never criminal, and the venue for disputing the arbitration clause (if you believe arbitration wasn't legal to begin with) are the public courts anyways, who will delegate or not to the private court.
Almost all countries recognize it and it has a quite defensible theory.
i think the keyword is "forced". there's very little now that the consumer can do because it seems everything requires arbitration now and people still have to operate in society.
It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.
I think my gripe is less that it exists and more so that it's not a negotiated agreement. I think it should only be allowed if the contract was negotiated between two parties with full authority to offer any terms in the negotiation. If it's a standardized, take it or leave it, contract where one party has no opportunity to offer alternative terms that get proper and full consideration by the other party, it shouldn't be allowed. In most of the examples you give, they are contracts that have been clearly negotiated between parties, not click-wrapped take it or leave it, my way or the highway, terms.
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
Arbitration isn't the issue. The issue is when one of the parties has vastly more legal resources than the other, and gets to pick the arbiter.
Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.
But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.
All these companies are universally sleazy and refuse to take responsibility, no matter what. It's pretty much par for the course: deny you are responsible, try to control the court case in such a way that you inflict even more suffering on the victims and their families and ultimately, even if you're found to be in the wrong do everything to stall payment until each and every legal avenue to do so is exhausted.
> Stone rejected Uber's argument that it is "merely a technology company" connecting riders with drivers, finding that Uber provides transportation services to the public through its app, sets prices and controls key aspects of the rider experience.
> The arbitrator also rejected Uber's argument that Proposition 22 -- a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that allows companies to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors instead of employees -- prevented the company from being held liable for Tran's conduct.
The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...
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.
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.
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.
The invention of the automobile didn't eliminate all horses, but it certainly replaced the vast majority of horses.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
I mostly agree. However, I do actually think that many of the skills you use as a software engineer will still be useful in 7 years. It's just that, as you suggest, no one will let us near any actual code.
>It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
Almost every career requires staying on top of new developments to remain competitive. Even mechanics must learn about new systems in vehicles to be able to repair them. Not many people are still meaningfully employed as Model T mechanics.
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate human-controlled driving in the same way that engines (ICE, electric, steam, whatever) have eliminated human and animal powered transportation.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
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]
So.. there's a driver in driverless cars. A fall guy that will take all blame should someone need to be arrested, but don't otherwise have leverage to earn a decent living
>So.. there's a driver in driverless cars. A fall guy that will take all the blame should the company needs to produce someone to be arrested
Are you seriously pretending the driver doesn't have agency here? This accident was easily preventable by the safety driver, which makes the "fall guy" characterization misleading. Sure, maybe there was some risk of complacency, but what's the alternative? Should uber have gone full workplace surveillance and have a camera trained on the safety driver's face, to make sure she was paying attention?
But.. they did have that? What a bizarre argument.
And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.
Train drivers seem to manage fine just fine. There are even train systems that are largely automated, with the driver largely relegated to being a "safety driver" and monitoring the doors.
Trains hit hundreds of people and thousands of vehicles every year, but we made it not their responsibility because you can't stop the train in time. You cannot accurately measure the comparison, since whether or not they were paying attention when they hit someone is both unknown and irrelevant.
The driverless car which, as well as having an insufficient and negligent safety driver (a regime that the Air Transport and Train industries would be happy to provide the hundred years worth of evidence that allows us to know ahead of time that this is not going to work), also had safety devices disabled.
The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
You should in fact not be allowed to do something dangerous, but say you were not liable because the danger was someone else's responsibility. No! The danger was your responsibility, no matter who you hire to manage it!
I don't see how that's a relevant point less those safety devices are mandatory. If my windshield broke, I was too lazy to fix it, and that resulted in auto-braking not working, then I was involved in an accident that could have been stopped with auto-braking, should I get extra flak because I didn't have auto-braking, even though it's not mandated?
>The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
The OP was talking about criminal responsibility. Obviously they should be responsible in civil court and pay damages, same as if UPS had one of its drivers crash into some kid. But should they be criminally responsible?
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.
If you don’t punish the corporation they won’t ensure they vet their employees and have strict policies and procedures around handling customers.
So in my mind the driver was at fault criminal negligence, but when the driver can be any untrained pleb with a phone, the company assumes the risk and should be held liable.
> If you don’t punish the corporation they won’t ensure they vet their employees and have strict policies and procedures around handling customers.
What if that's what you want?
Why should we be pressuring corporate middlemen to be regulators and law enforcement? They're not only bad at it and in no position to do it well, their attempts do more harm than good.
How is a corporation supposed to "vet" drivers? The only plausible tools they have are things like background checks. So now you have someone who is only trying to put food on the table getting excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly because they have an unrelated drug conviction from when they were 19 years old. Meanwhile the same thing happens in the case in question because that driver can pass the background check.
Whereas if you put the liability on the driver, i.e. the person who is actually there and making the decision, then losing their fancy new car and maybe going to jail provides the right incentive to not dump people in a dangerous place.
“…excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly…”
The platform enables anyone to interact with clients having minimal training except a drivers license. They are operating as agents of the corporation just classified as adjunct “gig workers.” Read: a loop hole to abdicate responsibility and blame the workers while the company makes money on them with minimal overhead.
Imagine an app where anyone could be an underpaid nurse, and said nurse poisons a patient with fentanyl. Who’s to blame then? The company for lack of oversight or the nurse? Or both?
Dropping them off at a gore is basically throwing them in the middle of the highway, many of them don't have easy access to a safe location without crossing the highway.
The court itself said taking the nearby exit would have allowed him to drop them off at a safe location. Yes, they could have injured themselves after that, but it's not the same.
If you’re a taxi driver you have a duty of care not to dump your passengers on the side of a freeway where pedestrians aren’t allowed. Same with a railroad crossing
And if you stop the car because a passenger was yelling there was an emergency? If your passengers refuse to get back in the car and wander off?
The “facts” of this event are highly contested and not at all clear. I’m not saying what I typed above is what happened, but it’s just as likely as the other scenarios presented. The linked PDF acknowledges this and presents a few of the conflicting statements made by the surviving passenger and the driver.
The problem here is where he stopped. Since when would you consider letting anyone out at a gore point?! General rule is your skill takes someone into hazard, you are expected to get them back out of hazard. In this case, they're drunk--traffic is a hazard. Gore points are not supposed to be occupied at all, let alone let out passengers there.
I question the $20M, but I have no problem at all with finding fault.
The linked PDF says the driver alleges that one of the passengers yelled there was an emergency which is why he pulled over where he did, that “fact” is contested and we will probably never know exactly what happened. But I’m not ready to buy into “driver forced them out at a gore point” given everything I’ve read. I agree that was the final outcome, they were left there, but I can come up with a number of scenarios (some backed by the driver’s testimony) in where the driver isn’t quite the monster some people in this thread want to make them out to be.
I’ve had personal experience dealing with drunk people in my car, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how you would get to this point. And that was with drunk people I knew, and mostly liked, not strangers. Drunk people do not normally act logically, especially if they are to the point of throwing up on themselves due to their level of intoxication.
(in my country, to get a bus driver license, you have to go through training that explain how to act in weird situation, how to identify dangers and which danger to prefer. You have a whole hour about always stopping at a safe place (parking, bus stop, red lignt, stop sign) before getting involved with anything that happen inside)
In the US, in employment, there is no such thing as common sense. People come from diverse backgrounds. When you have a million employees, anything is possible as as an untrained baseline. Everything has to be trained.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
Its interesting, saying sorry for your mistakes using plain words does not have the same impact as saying it in a convincing manner as if you mean it. Giving them a 10 page long documentation and asking them to just acknowledge it as a part of onboarding process wont do the job. We are talking about human life here and an emphasis on security should be baked into mind by regular training, and it is usually required for such jobs in general.
Being responsible for some one else's safety should have a higher bar than being responsible for your own safety.
I cannot claim to have done the onboarding process myself, tried to look up online and the most I could find is that a good amount of time is spend on doing background checks. I was able to find Uber's employee onboarding information for their corporate employees and it turns out that there is indeed some training required for people who are managing your corporate property. Ironically I do not see any mandatory (ideally paid for) training provided by Uber to drivers when they are handling other human beings (passengers). And to be fair its hard to predict everything, mistakes happen unfortunately, the goal should always be to get to a better state than where we are as of today.
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.
> 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.
Is it, though? If there is no driver to blame, then liability lies solely with Uber (or Waymo, as the case may be). I am not sure that that is a win from their PoV.
So Uber took this into forced arbitration to avoid the courts and then the arbitration blew up in their face. Sorry, but there’s some strong schadenfreude there.
Arbitration has no particular basis in law so much as agreeing that a third party reaches some conclusion to resolve a civil dispute, though the law may be used to justify the conclusion, the conclusion is binding regardless, so as to make it so there's no appeals, etc., right? So by participating in the arbitration it means there's only the conclusion and no basis to object or appeal, right?
Imagine this could've gone if Uber had used its tracking and vast knowledge of roadways to know to follow up with riders on a cancelled ride on the highway or even deny drivers the right to cancel the trip on the highway because that is unsafe. Could've prevented all this, have they learned from this case to prevent future incidents?
What does this have to do with following up with a rider on a cancelled trip on the highway which is literally the first option I mentioned.
Uber will call riders if the driver is veering off course for too long, why do you believe this is inapplicable here or why did you ignore the first option given.
This is what happens when every single company we have an app for forces us to re-agree to new TOC (most this year, but last year too).
Go check your e-mail - look at all the TOC agreements you had to make recently. How many added a new (or amended an existing) arbitration clause?
Too many. And consumers are stuck either agreeing blindly/under duress, or uninstalling the app? These are apps we use and rely on, and don't have enough competition to refuse.
Lyft and Uber. Name one other competitor in the app space. Without googling it
Rant over (it wasn't even a rant at the beginning but couldn't help myself)
ESH. Everyone sucks here. The person that hit them. The driver that dropped them off. The girls drinking to the point of stupor. Uber for not training drivers enough.
An important detail, according to the driver he didn't force her out. The girl got out after he pulled over to argue about / inspect the vomit and assess the situation.
"Tran argued that he responded reasonably to a perceived sudden emergency caused by the passengers' prior excessive drinking, of which he said he was unaware, & that he could not anticipate that Normandin-Parker would leave his vehicle and wander into traffic."
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 13.2 ms ] thread(Which is not to say there's not plenty to dislike about this whole case, including the fact it's forced arbitration...)
Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
Seems like that's an empirical question.
Companies are not doing this for faster problem resolution, they’re doing this to shield themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
The Uber case is extremely sad, people lost their lives and nothing brings them back, regardless of which justice system we use.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.
What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.
“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.
And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.
Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).
https://i.imgur.com/Hq61TTI.png
'The video "Based arbitrator destroys uber" Is Monetized'
'Advertising Status: Ads are active'
'Total Number of Ads: 1 (1 Post-roll)'
Food for thought (not specifically relevant to this case): I wonder how much would go away if the US had universal healthcare, or to put it another way, how much of its legal system is spent figuring out who pays for medical treatment
If there's a sports match, shouldn't the sports arbiter be able to decide whether some team scored a goal or not?
These are all valid civil contracts. It only affects the civil claims, never criminal, and the venue for disputing the arbitration clause (if you believe arbitration wasn't legal to begin with) are the public courts anyways, who will delegate or not to the private court.
Almost all countries recognize it and it has a quite defensible theory.
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.
But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.
> The arbitrator also rejected Uber's argument that Proposition 22 -- a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that allows companies to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors instead of employees -- prevented the company from being held liable for Tran's conduct.
The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...
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.
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.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.
To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.
Every other answer is bullshit.
*"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
Are you seriously pretending the driver doesn't have agency here? This accident was easily preventable by the safety driver, which makes the "fall guy" characterization misleading. Sure, maybe there was some risk of complacency, but what's the alternative? Should uber have gone full workplace surveillance and have a camera trained on the safety driver's face, to make sure she was paying attention?
And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.
You're conveniently omitting the fact it's a self driving car prototype and that the safety driver is supposed to catch failures.
The driverless car that very much had a safety driver, which got distracted because she was watching TV shows on her phone?
The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
You should in fact not be allowed to do something dangerous, but say you were not liable because the danger was someone else's responsibility. No! The danger was your responsibility, no matter who you hire to manage it!
I don't see how that's a relevant point less those safety devices are mandatory. If my windshield broke, I was too lazy to fix it, and that resulted in auto-braking not working, then I was involved in an accident that could have been stopped with auto-braking, should I get extra flak because I didn't have auto-braking, even though it's not mandated?
>The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
The OP was talking about criminal responsibility. Obviously they should be responsible in civil court and pay damages, same as if UPS had one of its drivers crash into some kid. But should they be criminally responsible?
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.
So in my mind the driver was at fault criminal negligence, but when the driver can be any untrained pleb with a phone, the company assumes the risk and should be held liable.
What if that's what you want?
Why should we be pressuring corporate middlemen to be regulators and law enforcement? They're not only bad at it and in no position to do it well, their attempts do more harm than good.
How is a corporation supposed to "vet" drivers? The only plausible tools they have are things like background checks. So now you have someone who is only trying to put food on the table getting excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly because they have an unrelated drug conviction from when they were 19 years old. Meanwhile the same thing happens in the case in question because that driver can pass the background check.
Whereas if you put the liability on the driver, i.e. the person who is actually there and making the decision, then losing their fancy new car and maybe going to jail provides the right incentive to not dump people in a dangerous place.
The platform enables anyone to interact with clients having minimal training except a drivers license. They are operating as agents of the corporation just classified as adjunct “gig workers.” Read: a loop hole to abdicate responsibility and blame the workers while the company makes money on them with minimal overhead.
Imagine an app where anyone could be an underpaid nurse, and said nurse poisons a patient with fentanyl. Who’s to blame then? The company for lack of oversight or the nurse? Or both?
The court itself said taking the nearby exit would have allowed him to drop them off at a safe location. Yes, they could have injured themselves after that, but it's not the same.
You can’t dump your passengers on the freeway, for any reason. It’s not safe for them or for the other drivers on the road.
The “facts” of this event are highly contested and not at all clear. I’m not saying what I typed above is what happened, but it’s just as likely as the other scenarios presented. The linked PDF acknowledges this and presents a few of the conflicting statements made by the surviving passenger and the driver.
I question the $20M, but I have no problem at all with finding fault.
I’ve had personal experience dealing with drunk people in my car, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how you would get to this point. And that was with drunk people I knew, and mostly liked, not strangers. Drunk people do not normally act logically, especially if they are to the point of throwing up on themselves due to their level of intoxication.
I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.
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".
lol, have you ever taken a taxi?
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.
You think they don't?
Being responsible for some one else's safety should have a higher bar than being responsible for your own safety.
I cannot claim to have done the onboarding process myself, tried to look up online and the most I could find is that a good amount of time is spend on doing background checks. I was able to find Uber's employee onboarding information for their corporate employees and it turns out that there is indeed some training required for people who are managing your corporate property. Ironically I do not see any mandatory (ideally paid for) training provided by Uber to drivers when they are handling other human beings (passengers). And to be fair its hard to predict everything, mistakes happen unfortunately, the goal should always be to get to a better state than where we are as of today.
A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.
Is it, though? If there is no driver to blame, then liability lies solely with Uber (or Waymo, as the case may be). I am not sure that that is a win from their PoV.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/9/16
[2] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=7.06.050
I don't think its unreasonable to argue that Uber has a duty not to hand riders over to known reckless drivers.
Uber will call riders if the driver is veering off course for too long, why do you believe this is inapplicable here or why did you ignore the first option given.
Go check your e-mail - look at all the TOC agreements you had to make recently. How many added a new (or amended an existing) arbitration clause?
Too many. And consumers are stuck either agreeing blindly/under duress, or uninstalling the app? These are apps we use and rely on, and don't have enough competition to refuse.
Lyft and Uber. Name one other competitor in the app space. Without googling it
Rant over (it wasn't even a rant at the beginning but couldn't help myself)
"Tran argued that he responded reasonably to a perceived sudden emergency caused by the passengers' prior excessive drinking, of which he said he was unaware, & that he could not anticipate that Normandin-Parker would leave his vehicle and wander into traffic."