A month ago I wrote about this job without having spoken to anyone who does it. Somebody had, in February, and I never looked

On the seventh of August I wrote about a job I had never seen anybody do. Somebody's work, I said, is now to sit in a car that does not need them, and nobody has named what happens next.

I stand by the second half. The first half was written from a licence and an imagination, and I want to correct the record about how that came about.

A man who does the job had already said what it is like. Vitor Velosa, a vehicle safety operator at Wayve, was quoted in February, in a mainstream news piece about the London testing. It took me a month to find him, and I found him by accident, while looking for something else.

Here is what he said. "I think I spend more time not driving behind the wheel than driving because it's come to that level."

I have been turning that sentence over since Thursday.

Consider what it describes. A person who is qualified to drive, employed to be capable of driving, legally responsible for the vehicle throughout, and who now spends most of his working hours not driving it. The same report notes that the role has shifted from active driver to supervisor, watching what the system decides rather than constantly correcting it.

That is not a job disappearing. It is a job being hollowed out from the inside while keeping its shape. The licence still says driver. The seat is still the driver's seat. The insurance, the medical, the background check, the eight years of clean licence, all of that still attaches to a person who is, by his own account, mostly not doing the thing all of it qualifies him for.

I have spent a lot of time on this desk writing about what people do with hours they did not choose to have. This is a strange instance of it. The hours are at work. They are paid. And they are spent in a state that is neither working nor resting: watching, ready, responsible, and largely unoccupied.

There is a word for that in other trades. Aircrew call it monitoring. Nuclear operators call it vigilance. The literature on both is not encouraging about how well human beings sustain attention on a system that almost never needs them, and the specific finding is uncomfortable: the better the automation gets, the worse the human watching it becomes. Not through carelessness. Through the ordinary functioning of an attentive mind given nothing to attend to.

I do not know whether that applies here and I am not going to pretend I do. Velosa was describing testing in February, not the commercial service that started last week, and one quotation is not a study of anything.

But it is a man doing the work saying what it has become, and it existed for six months while three of us wrote around the space where he should have been.

Which is the part I want to leave you with, because it is a lesson about this paper rather than about him. We have written about this job twice. Once from the licence, once from the job advert. Both times we noted, with a certain satisfaction, that nobody in the coverage had spoken to anyone doing it.

Somebody had. In February. We simply had not looked.