A company with a horrendous reputation for having an unethical,
and harsh, company culture is likely to be attracted to places in which lax
regulatory oversight exists. A governmental view that regulations should be
minimized dovetails with such a company. The two are a match, though not
exactly made in heaven. The nexus can be situated closer to the ground, in a
desert in North America, in Arizona in particular. In the case of Uber, which
was testing its self-driving cars there in 2018, the flashpoint came in March,
when such a car hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street without a sustained
sidewalk. Suddenly society took another look, a much more hesitant look, at
self-driving technology. Missed, however, was the nexus between Uber’s squalid
culture/mentality and Arizona—the culpability of both having led to a perfect
storm.
“Uber’s robotic vehicle project was not living up to
expectations months before” the accident.[1]
Specifically, the cars “were having trouble driving through construction zones
and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs,” and the company’s “human drivers had
to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car
projects. Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in
tests on roads in California [in 2017], its cars went an average of nearly
5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer
out of trouble. As of March, [2018] Uber was struggling to meet its target of
13 miles per ‘intervention’ in Arizona.”[2]
So Uber’s technology was not as good. The company’s dysfunctional culture can
be seen in the fact that “Uber’s test
drivers were being asked to do more—going on solo runs when they had
[previously] worked in pairs.”[3]
When two employees had been in a self-driving car, one
person sat behind the wheel ready to take over if the autonomous system failed,
while the other person kept an eye on what the computers were detecting. “The
second person,” in other words, “was responsible for keeping track of system
performance as well as labeling data on a laptop computer.”[4]
When Uber took out the second person in the self-driving cars, “some employees
expressed safety concerns to managers.”[5]
Although those concerns centered around whether a person alone could “remain
alert during hours of monotonous driving,” the actual problems extended to solo
stand-by drivers staying on task. Specifically, drivers would often annotate
data onto an app mounted on an iPad in the car’s middle console to alert
managers to problems. The drivers were to do so only when the car was at a traffic
light or stop, “but many of the drivers did so while the car was moving.”[6]
Other problems included drivers falling asleep at the self-driving wheel; one
driver was spotted “air-drumming” through an intersection. This reminds me of
the local (creeper) bus drivers in Tucson who contort internal mirrors so to be
able to stare at riders even while turning the bus through intersections!
When the self-driving Uber car hit the pedestrian in Tempe
at full speed, the solo “driver” was reportedly looking down. The extent of the
waywardness among the solo “drivers” points to incompetent supervision, but
also perhaps a culture in which doing the right thing both ethically and in
terms of staying on task is not valued. Furthermore, the managerial decision to
go from pairs to solo drivers even though the company had been struggling to
meet its target of 13 miles per intervention in Arizona points to managerial
incompetence (specifically, to bad judgment). That “there was pressure to live
up to a goal to offer driverless car service by the end of the year and to
impress top executives” suggests that the company’s dysfunctional culture had a
role in the crash.[7] That
Uber’s management had been trying to improve the company’s image since
Khosrowshahi had replaced Kalanick as CEO could account for the bad substance “on
the ground,” as well as a decision not to tackle the unethical climate inside
the company, but, rather, to paint a glossy coat on top of it for the public to
see.
Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman, stated after the crash, “As
we develop self-driving technology, safety is our primary concern every step of
the way.”[8]
This was obviously a lie, given the switch to solo “drivers” even without any
improvement in the intervention rate. Kallman felt the need to add, “We’re
heartbroken by what happened.”[9]
Another lie! The company’s culture was not known for sentimental feelings; in
fact, managers were quite harsh on their subordinates, and thus without even
ordinary empathy. Such lies are themselves indicative of a continuing sordid
corporate culture, which combined with managerial, supervisory, and solo-driver
incompetence (and bad attitude) goes a long way to explaining why the crash
occurred. We can’t simply blame the technology, though it was also behind the
loop relative to the technology being used by competitors.
That Uber’s management would seize on Arizona, which offered
a relative dearth of regulatory oversight, makes perfect sense. States like
Arizona that do not tend to view government regulation as instrumental in protecting
the public interest even from companies such as Uber are actually like such
companies. Uber got away with “testing its self-driving cars in a regulatory
vacuum in Arizona,” whose government officials “had taken a hands-off approach
to autonomous vehicles and did not require companies to disclose how their cars
were performing.”[10] Uber’s
solo drivers and Arizona’s legislators and regulators were all hands off. Let the chips fall where they
may.
What might be missed is the congruence—the likeness—between the
mentality of Uber’s people and Arizona’s political elite and its supporters. The
mentality that looks the other way can find a match between an unethical
company and a government that views even just regulatory oversight as too
imposing, as noxious. In effect, Arizona was, at the time at least, like one of
Uber’s self-driving cars, with government officials “air-drumming” through
intersections. Such performances were particularly dangerous where municipal
bus drivers, whose driving I was pathetic, felt entitled nonetheless to stare
at particular riders inside the bus rather than look out ahead, even while
driving through intersections.
See Cases of Unethical Business
[1]
Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona
Crash,” The New York Times, March 23,
2018.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8]
Ibid.
[9]
Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
