In 1985, Dr Emmett Brown, the fictional scientist in Back to the Future, was telling cinema audiences that by 2015 we would not need roads. Whatever talent the inventor of the flux capacitor was supposed to have for converting DeLoreans into time machines did not extend into envisioning the future of automobiles. Here we are in 2023, and families are yet to fly between homes and city centres using express skyways. If we are missing individual aerial transportation, then what we do have is the beginning of the age of the autonomous vehicle. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere you look right now – from ChatGPT writing articles and papers (though, I would like to assure you, not this piece), to chatbots answering customer queries, and robots carrying out quality control in factories. And on the roads, you can already see AI in the cars we are driving today, via cruise control and lane assist technologies. It is likely that the degree of autonomy will only increase, and we can imagine a future populated by fully autonomous cars, freight and road maintenance machinery. All of this makes for a future of road transportation quite different from today. Even if we do not have to worry about dodging rogue hoverboard users while travelling down the M6, it is likely to be on the roads that we see some of the most widely visible autonomous systems in action. PREPARATION IS KEY Here at Lancaster, we have been working with National Highways – a government-owned company who are responsible for motorways and major Aroads in England – for over a year now to help them prepare for this quite different future. This work is part of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems: Security project. It includes computer scientists and engineers working on developing systems for securing autonomous systems – for navigation, flight etc – to try and protect them from people trying to hack or disrupt the system. But I and my colleagues are looking at how these new technologies interact with people, using insights from sociology, organisation studies, law and philosophy. The kinds of issues we look at are how questions of ethics and security overlap, and how we might understand the organisational context of autonomous systems’ design and deployment. We have been working with National Highways to explore their evolving role as an organisation, whether through their own use of autonomous systems or how they respond to increased autonomous system use by road users in ever more automated vehicles – or what are often called connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). 8 |
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