Autonomous automobilities: The social impacts of driverless vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are one of the most highly anticipated technological developments of our time, with potentially wide-ranging social implications. Where dominant popular discourses around autonomous vehicles have tended to espouse a crude form of technological determinism, social scientific engagements with autonomous vehicles have tended to focus on rather narrow utilitarian dimensions related to regulation, safety or efficiency. This article argues that what is therefore largely missing from current debates is a sensitivity to the broader social implications of autonomous vehicles. The article aims to remedy this absence. Through a speculative mode, it is shown how a mobilities approach provides an ideal conceptual lens through which the broader social impacts of autonomous vehicles might be identified and evaluated. The argument is organized across four dimensions: transformations to experiences, inequalities, labour and systems. The article develops an agenda for critical sociological work on automated vehicles; and it calls on sociologists to contribute much-needed critical voices to the institutional and public debates on the development of autonomous vehicles.

Cycling the Smart and Sustainable City: Analyzing EC Policy Documents on Internet of Things, Mobility and Transport, and Smart Cities

“…This finding from policy documents links in with how cycling is treated in the majority of academic literature on cycling, where it is also largely regarded as an 'offline' mode of transport [8,10] and with those academic visions of smarter and greener mobility that are also often very car-focused [3][4][5], and with IoT-related work such as a recent article on smart cities and IoT that also uses car-centric examples around transport: "IoT can be used in transport to: provide an intelligent parking, create new routing services, ensure an intelligent tracking of vehicles, improve security level through the use of road sensors or RFID" [2] (p. 5). This shows how automobility, the "self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system that spreads world-wide, and includes cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs" [6] (p. 27) extends into the 'smart' age and this paper contributes to the critical literature on automobility, especially to the emerging mobility studies work on 'smart' mobilities [43,44]. Furthermore, it contributes to research on digital culture, where 'smart' and 'IoT' elements are discussed (e.g., [45]), but transport and mobility are rarely considered.…”

Conceptualising technology, its development and future: The six genres of technology

“…In contrast is the notion of the autonomous vehicle that has been designed to function in a smart transport infrastructure system with minimum of human intervention once it has been brought into being ( Bissell et al., 2020 ). Further, they are not confined to the ground as illustrated with experiments in Dubai with autonomous aerial taxis ( Mohamed et al., 2018 ).…”

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“…In the literature, the term 'AVs' generally refers to vehicles that are capable of navigating around urban environments without human assistance (Thrun, 2010). Compared to the instruction-based computing of existing transport automation such as autopilot mode in aircraft and on trains (Mindell, 2015), AVs operate through data-driven computing enabled by artificial intelligence and robotic technology (Bissell, Birtchnell, Elliott, & Hsu, 2020). What this means is that in theory AVs can sense and process codified information from their surroundings to render urban mobilities efficient, for example, by skirting around traffic delays and accidents in city streets.…”