> Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out.

Driving a truck is in no way comparable to what this lady was tasked to do. A truck driver is performing an active task (operating a truck), this lady was supposed to be performing a passive task (monitoring a truck's driving). Active and passive tasks are very different beasts.

But you're on to something with your comparison to pilots. Planes are mostly automated. When that automation fails, the pilots often lack the situational awareness to avoid a crash when they have to take over (for an example, see https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...).

I don't think this distinction is morally meaningful. Do passive monitoring tasks require more discipline? Probably. Are you unable to perform them? Get another job.

How many times do you think this driver was distracted with the phone when doing their job? I bet it wasn't just this one time that they happened to crash.

Pilots crash after hours of boredom because debugging problems in the air is hard, not because they were negligent leading up to the problem (vast majority of the time, anyway). And still by and large they succeed, it just goes unreported in the news because business-as-usual. This driver on the other hand got into an unrecoverable situation because of their own behaviour.

Except they're not driving, they're just watching as the car drives itself. Driving implies you are perform actions in response to the environment, these people do not, they simply sit and watch.