Sociotechnical Specification for the Broader Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles
Abstract
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will have a transformative impact on society. Beyond the local safety and efficiency of individual vehicles, these effects will also change how people interact with the entire transportation system. This will generate a diverse range of large and foreseeable effects on social outcomes, as well as how those outcomes are distributed. However, the ability to control both the individual behavior of AVs and the overall flow of traffic also provides new affordances that permit AVs to control these effects. This comprises a problem of sociotechnical specification: the need to distinguish which essential features of the transportation system are in or out of scope for AV development. We present this problem space in terms of technical, sociotechnical, and social problems, and illustrate examples of each for the transport system components of social mobility, public infrastructure, and environmental impacts. The resulting research methodology sketches a path for developers to incorporate and evaluate more transportation system features within AV system components over time.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2205.07395,
title = {Sociotechnical Specification for the Broader Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles},
author = {Thomas Krendl Gilbert and Aaron J. Snoswell and Michael Dennis and Rowan McAllister and Cathy Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.07395},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Paper accepted for presentation at ICRA 2022 workshop "Fresh Perspectives on the Future of Autonomous Driving"