Autonomous Vehicles - II: Visions and Imaginaries for Autonomous Systems

Abstract

This session explores imaginaries, politics, users and consequences of the emerging technologies of autonomous vehicles and the digitalization of transportation infrastructure. It problematizes these technologies across temporal, scalar, systemic and disciplinary boundaries. The goal is to stimulate a rich debate on the co-production of autonomous vehicles and society, and to shed light on how the complexity, hybridity, and diversity of these emerging technologies could be understood, interpreted and governed.

According to popular narratives, self-driving vehicles promise wide-ranging socio-technical transformations with potential implications for mobility, safety, environment, infrastructure, urban development and planning. STS scholars have highlighted the ambivalent and contested characteristics of autonomous vehicles and digital infrastructures. While techno-epistemic actors who push the self-driving agenda produce rich imaginaries highlighting massive potential gains within traffic safety, goods transport, energy efficiency and climate mitigation, others question the politics of self-driving vehicles by asking how they feed into wider algorithmic cultures of governance and deep digitalization.

This also raises important questions of cyber security and surveillance and the exploitation of big data by actors such as nation states, corporations, political parties and interest groups. Further on, what are the implications for labor markets, governance and planning? Are current technological scripts socially just? From the perspective of technology users, this raises questions of the changing roles and practices of drivers, ownership of transport data, app-economies, new services, mobility cultures and democracy. Driverless vehicles might also enable engagement with moral dilemmas such as variations of the “trolley problem.”

Chair

• Jack Stilgoe, University College London

Individual Presentations

• Autonomous Vehicles and the Automobility Imaginary - Richard Randell, Webster University; Robert Braun, Institut für Höhere Studien Vienna

• Reshaping Stavanger? Autonomous Buses, Intelligent Infrastructures and the Sociology of Expectations in Urban Transport - Bård Torvetjønn Haugland, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)

• Driven by the Data: A Scenario Analysis Approach to Data Security and Autonomous Vehicles - Samuel Kodua, James Madison University

• Autonomous Vehicles in Global Semi-Peripheries - Aleksandra Lis, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

Session Organizer

• Roger Andre Søraa, NTNU