PJ Vogt

Now, he's accused of using his personal laptop and downloading more than 14,000 files.

In 2016, Google had just spun its driverless car unit into a new entity, Waymo.

Waymo sued Uber.

Uber had to settle to the tune of $245 million.

And in a separate criminal trial, Anthony Lewandowski pled guilty to stealing trade secrets.

Afterwards, Uber continues their driverless car program without him, continuing to pursue its move fast, break things strategy, which in 2018 leads to the death of a woman named Elaine Hertzberg.

The way this story was reported, nearly everyone blamed the safety driver.

She was on her phone.

She was streaming an episode of The Voice.

There was some important additional context, which is that Uber's robot driver was also just much worse than Waymo's.

A statistic I found jaw-dropping.

At this point, Waymo safety drivers were having to take over from the car once every 5,600 miles.

Uber's safety drivers that year had to intervene more than once every 13 miles.

Despite that, five months before the crash, over employee objections, Uber had cut its safety crews.

Instead of two humans, they just used one.

One safety driver overseeing a robot driver that was arguably not ready to be on public roads.

In the last moments of Elaine Hertzberg's life, the robot spent an indefensible 5.6 seconds trying and failing to guess the shape in the road that was a human body pushing a bike.

Over those 5.6 seconds, the robot kept reclassifying her.

Was she an unknown object?

A vehicle?