The politics of ‘autonomous vehicles’
- Submission status
- Closed
- Submission deadline
‘Self-driving’, ‘driverless’ or ‘autonomous’ vehicles promise to change the world in profound ways. The suggested benefits include safety, efficiency, accessibility and improved urban environments. However, researchers and others have been quick to raise questions about responsibility for crashes, safe testing and possible wider ramifications for transport systems. In a discussion that has been dominated by science, engineering and narrow questions of ethics, there is a need to draw attention to the old questions of politics: Who wins? Who loses? Who decides? Who pays?
This Collection (special issue) will publish original research that helps anticipate the politics of autonomous vehicles. The focus could be on the road, where vehicles are being tested and interactions with other road users are being worked out, on the lab, where rapid developments in machine learning and simulation are generating new possibilities, on discourses about possible and desirable futures, or somewhere else.
Despite the ‘autonomous vehicle’ terminology, these technologies, when considered through social science lenses, look far from autonomous. They will be shaped by human interests and expectations, and future sociotechnical systems will be entangled in social worlds (infrastructures, rules, norms, behaviours, institutions and more) in complex and possibly unpredictable ways.
We invite contributions from researchers on the following themes as they relate to self-driving vehicles:
- Infrastructures of ‘autonomy’
- Connectivity and sociotechnical systems
- Algorithms and AI
- Data ownership, control and privacy
- The rules of the road
- Public vs private control
- Patterns of transport use, e.g. shared, active etc.
- Competing for road space
- Urban design, including ‘shared space’
- Lessons from other mobility technologies
- Histories of self-driving futures
- Testing AV technologies
- Sustainable technological transitions
- Participation and democratic governance
This article Collection is an initiative of the UKRI Driverless Futures? project.
Editors
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Milos Mladenovic
Aalto University, Finland
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Jack Stilgoe
University College London, UK
