Anticipating Self-Driving Worlds

• In Event: Autonomous Vehicles - I: Practices and Policies of Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Automotive autonomy, once seen as impossible, is now sold as inevitable. Much of the governance discussion has centred on risk: will the cars be safer than their human-controlled counterparts? How might artificial intelligence make moral choices in matters of life and death? As with conventional cars, harder long-term questions relate to the future worlds that self-driving technologies might enable or even demand. The vision of an autonomous vehicle – able to navigate the world’s complexity using only its sensors and processors – on offer from companies like Tesla is intentionally misleading. So-called “autonomous” vehicles will depend upon webs of social and technical connectivity. For their purported benefits to be realised, infrastructures (physical, digital and socio-legal) that were designed around humans and automobiles will need to be upgraded in order to become machine-readable. It is vital to anticipate the politics of self-driving worlds in order to avoid exacerbating the inequalities that have emerged around conventional cars. In this paper, I offer an alternative model for the governance of self-driving cars, democratising experimentation through collaboration between companies and local governments.

Author

• Jack Stilgoe, University College London