Abstract:
Autonomous Driving (often called self-driving) cars were the most hyped emerging technology in 2015, and Autonomous Driving Vehicles (ADV) featured amongst MIT Technology Review’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies in 2015, 2016 and 2017. They are now reviewed, debated and discussed across multiple policy, industry, technology design and public media narratives daily. In these debates AD futures are frequently visioned as utopian or dystopian and subsequently associated with assumptions about beneficial or apocalyptic individual and societal impacts that AD technologies and services would have on future lives, cities and security. Predicted benefits include energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, and improved quality of life, safety and wellbeing for users. Concerns relate to regulation and power relations embedded in the decision making and ethics of automation and machine intelligence, data and privacy, technology failure, transport system disruption and urban congestion. Yet while these science and technology, business and regulatory narratives frequently predict and describe human futures, there is little research or understanding of how diverse human lifestyles, experience, feelings and actions will be implicated in co-constituting these futures. Instead it is often problematically assumed in industry and policy contexts that the benefits promised by AD will be achieved if humans simply trust, accept and adapt to them. Subsequently technology and infrastructure research, testing and preparation by industry, planning and policy stakeholders is focused towards these ends, and is usually undertaken in preparation for AD roll out in the large cities, and highways of the Global North.

In this talk I will discuss recent collective ethnographic research into how people imagine and experience future AD cars. Through this I will discuss how anthropological interventions based on an ethnographic-theoretical dialogue around questions such as trust, uncertainty and incompleteness propose a re-thinking of the assumptions that underpin dominant discourses concerning the 'impact' AD will have on society. 

In doing so I would like to open up discussion about the role of anthropologists in relation to emerging technologies; how where and why should we intervene?; what are the ethics and politics of our engagement in such interdisciplinary fields?