So assuming the driver knows all of this (and that's a big assumption), then you have the blame shared two ways, and it's hard to tell who deserves more.
(1) You'd have the driver being at fault, since they were responsible for controlling the vehicle at the time, even though the computer was doing the majority of the driving. In this case, the driver should not have been using their phone and ignoring the road and their duties to control the car.
(2) Uber should share some blame for not building alerts to the driver into the system.
But how much of these responsibilities Uber made clear to the driver is very much worth knowing, because however you slice it this was not so much a failure of technology as human negligence.
We've known for a while now that the driver wasn't using their phone. Instead, they were interacting with the car console where information about the self driving car system was being displayed. During earlier testing there were two test-drivers, one to watch the road and one to watch the console. But to speed up testing Uber had moved to assigning one test driver to both tasks.
So assuming the driver knows all of this (and that's a big assumption), then you have the blame shared two ways, and it's hard to tell who deserves more.
(1) You'd have the driver being at fault, since they were responsible for controlling the vehicle at the time, even though the computer was doing the majority of the driving. In this case, the driver should not have been using their phone and ignoring the road and their duties to control the car.
(2) Uber should share some blame for not building alerts to the driver into the system.
But how much of these responsibilities Uber made clear to the driver is very much worth knowing, because however you slice it this was not so much a failure of technology as human negligence.