> No municipality in the country should allow Uber to test on their streets after they killed someone
This is pitchfork mentality.
Many industries have to deal with unintentional deaths. Car manufacturers sometimes have to deal with deaths resulting from hardware failure. Food companies sometimes have to deal with recalls due to food poisoning deaths. If the response to a death is to ban all further production work, eventually nothing is ever going to get done because it's inherently impossible to be perfect all the time.
It sucks that it had to come to someone's death, but the rest of the statement said:
> we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture
so it sounds like Uber is at least trying in earnest to put the house in order.
Said cynic sounds pitchforky. Even HIPAA tries to work with non-compliant companies to get them compliant before resorting to dishing out their notoriously expensive fines.
At the end of the day, the NTSB isn't in the game of shutting down companies. NTSB would much rather see that self-driving vehicle development is happening safely since the matter of the fact is that it _is_ happening, despite all of its imperfections.
I may have abused the 'revolving door' term a bit, but I think you are missing the point of hiring former regulators.
You are not hiring them for their bio, achievements or abilities. You are hiring them to signal existing and future regulators that being nice to you can be highly profitable.
You keep saying Uber hired him, but where did you read that? The statement in the article said "we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us". Given how high profile Hart is, and given the focus of his career, I understood that to mean that he agreed to review safety practices and make safety policy recommendations, a topic in which he's an expert on. Unlike wording like "joining to lead a safety program", this arrangement doesn't really imply profit-driven motivation, IMHO.
I don't see any other way to interpret their statement:
> Uber, which suspended testing of autonomous vehicles after the accident, on Monday said it was looking at its self-driving program and said it retained Christopher Hart, a former chairman of the NTSB, to advise it on safety.
> “We have initiated a top-to-bottom safety review of our self-driving vehicles program, and we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture,” Uber said. “Our review is looking at everything from the safety of our system to our training processes for vehicle operators, and we hope to have more to say soon.”
This is pitchfork mentality.
Many industries have to deal with unintentional deaths. Car manufacturers sometimes have to deal with deaths resulting from hardware failure. Food companies sometimes have to deal with recalls due to food poisoning deaths. If the response to a death is to ban all further production work, eventually nothing is ever going to get done because it's inherently impossible to be perfect all the time.
It sucks that it had to come to someone's death, but the rest of the statement said:
> we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture
so it sounds like Uber is at least trying in earnest to put the house in order.