Responsibility, rationality, and acceptance: How future users of autonomous driving are constructed in stakeholders’ sociotechnical imaginaries

Abstract

Although autonomous driving is expected to provide a solution for various mobility-related issues, ideas on how the technology will actually unfold are vague. Nevertheless, stakeholders in the field hold expectations about the technology and the future users. With very few exceptions, so far research does not focus on these expectations as social constructions of individuals and publics. In addition, these perceptions play only a minor role in the technology-centered debate. Thus, to bring these perceptions to light and to analyze their implications, we draw on the sociotechnical imaginaries approach to reconstruct stakeholders’ views of future users and publics. We perform a qualitative content analysis and show that imaginaries unfold along the themes of responsibility for the process of driving, rationality in decision-making, and acceptance for emerging technologies. We discuss how the themes relate to each other, what role science plays, and what implications follow from the respective stakeholders’ views.

Reframing sociotechnical imaginaries: The case of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

“…In recent years, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries gained intellectual traction, giving rise to several studies dedicated to the examination of technology-based innovations across countries and political regimes: energy production and remote sensing in the United States (Lawrence, 2020; Smith and Tidwell, 2016), smart cities and multinational corporations (Sadowski and Bendor, 2019) as well as digital touch and bioenergy (Jewitt et al, 2021; Levidow and Raman, 2020) in the United Kingdom, Internet in Russia (Keidiia, 2019), autonomous driving in Germany (Graf and Sonnberger, 2020), family farming in Argentina (Goulet, 2020) and food security in Sweden (Eriksson et al, 2020), just to mention some of the most recent endeavours.…”

Rolling in the deep

“…The explanation why experienced persons have higher acceptance levels, however, might be due to different reasons: on the one hand, users might know factually more (about benefits and risks), which allows them to evaluate autonomous driving realistically; on the other, users might feel to be better informed about potential factual and perceived risks which, as a consequence, increases the trust towards automated vehicle technology (Zaunbrecher et al 2018;Petersen et al 2018;Distler et al 2018). Thus, both cognitive and affective factors influence public acceptance (Zaunbrecher et al 2018;Liu et al 2019b;Graf and Sonnberger 2020). However, at this point, it is the question how a transparent and diligent information policy could help to allow future users to realistically evaluate not only the enormous potential of autonomous vehicle technology but also the risks and uncertainties which come with it.…”

Sociocultural dimensions of mobility transitions to come: introduction to the special issue

“…A technocentric view on (sustainable) mobility transitions is still dominant while the sociocultural dimensions of mobility remain rather neglected. This technocentric view is accompanied by a widespread hope that technological developments and innovations will bring about and facilitate the necessary sustainable changes (Graf and Sonnberger 2020).…”