Psychological roadblocks to the adoption of self-driving vehicles
Summary (2 min read)
Standfirst
- The authors discuss three—ethical dilemmas, overreactions to accidents, and the opacity of the cars’ decision-making algorithms—and propose steps towards addressing them.
- Manufacturers are speeding past the remaining technical challenges to the cars’ readiness.
- For AVs, which will need to navigate their complex urban environment with the power of life and death, trust will determine how widely they are adopted by consumers, and how tolerated they are by everyone else.
- Here the authors diagnose three factors underlying this resistance and offer a plan of action (see Table).
The Dilemmas of Autonomous Ethics
- The necessity for AVs to make ethical decisions leads to a series of dilemmas for their designers, regulators, and the public at large3.
- In handling these situations, the cars may operate as utilitarians, minimizing total risk to people regardless of who they are, or as self-protective, placing extra weight on the safety of their own passengers.
- The existence of this ethical dilemma in turn produces a social dilemma.
- Communication about the overall safety benefits of AVs could be further leveraged to appeal to potential consumers’ concerns about self-image and reputation.
- Virtue signalling is a powerful motivation for buying ethical products—but only when the ethicality is conspicuous4.
Risk Heuristics and Algorithm Aversion
- When the first traffic fatality involving Tesla’s Autopilot occurred in May 2016, it was covered by every major news organization—a feat unmatched by any of the other 40,200 US traffic fatalities that year.
- AV spokespeople should prepare the public for the inevitability of accidents—not overpromising infallibility, but still emphasizing AVs' safety advantages over human drivers.
- Though human themselves, and ultimately answerable to the public, legislators should resist capitulating to the public’s fears of low-probability risks8.
- But even if a detailed account of the computer’s decisions were available, it would only offer the enduser an incomprehensible deluge of information.
- For AVs, whereas some transparency can improve trust, too much transparency into the explanations for the car’s actions can overwhelm the passenger, increasing anxiety10.
A new social contract
- Automobiles began their transformational integration into their lives over a century ago.
- A system of laws regulating the behaviour of drivers and pedestrians, and the designs and practices of manufacturers, has been introduced and continuously refined.
- In that time, the authors will need a new social contract that provides clear guidelines about who is responsible for different kinds of accidents, how monitoring and enforcement will be performed, and how trust among all stakeholders can be engendered.
- The authors have identified several here, but more work remains.
- Every day the adoption of autonomous cars is delayed is another day that people will continue to lose their lives to the non-autonomous human drivers of yesterday.
Competing interests
- The novelty and nature of AVs will result in outsized reactions in the face of inevitable accidents.
- Manage public overreaction with “fear placebos” and information about actual risks levels.
- Research the type of information required to form trustable mental models of AVs.
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Frequently Asked Questions (17)
Q2. What is the role of trust in AVs?
For AVs, which will need to navigate their complex urban environment with the power of life and death, trust will determine how widely they are adopted by consumers, and how tolerated they are by everyone else.
Q3. What are the main reasons why people are reluctant to use a car?
In handling these situations, the cars may operate as utilitarians, minimizing total risk to people regardless of who they are, or as self-protective, placing extra weight on the safety of their own passengers.
Q4. What is the effect of a large media coverage of a crash involving an AV?
Outsized media coverage of crashes involving AVs may feed and amplify people's fears by tapping into the availability heuristic (risks are subjectively higher when they come to mind easily) and affective heuristic (risks are perceived to be higher when they evoke a vivid emotional reaction).
Q5. What is the relevant example of successful virtue consumerism?
The most relevant example of successful virtue consumerism is that of the Toyota Prius, a hybrid-electric automobile whose distinctive shape has allowed owners to signal their environmental commitment.
Q6. What is the main reason why AVs are so complex?
AV intelligence is driven in part by machine learning, in which computers learn increasingly sophisticated patterns without being explicitly taught.
Q7. What is the role of AVs in the public debate?
AV spokespeople should prepare the public for the inevitability of accidents—not overpromising infallibility, but still emphasizing AVs'safety advantages over human drivers.
Q8. What are the main challenges of the integration of autonomous cars?
Many challenges remain— hacking, liability, and labour displacement issues, most significantly— but this social contract will be bound as much by psychological realities as by technological and legal ones.
Q9. What is the history of autonomous cars?
In this time, a system of laws regulating the behaviour of drivers and pedestrians, and the designs and practices of manufacturers, has been introduced and continuously refined.
Q10. What are the biggest roadblocks to the mass adoption of autonomous vehicles?
But the biggest roadblocks standing in the path of the mass adoption may be psychological, not technological; 78% of Americans report fearing riding in an AV, with only 19% indicating they would trust the car1.
Q11. What could derail the adoption of AVs?
These reactions could derail the adoption of AVs through numerous paths; it could directly deter consumers, it could provoke politicians to enact suffocating restrictions, or it could create outsized liability issues—fuelled by court and jury overreactions—that compromise the financial feasibility of AVs.
Q12. What are the main points of the article?
Self-driving cars offer a bright future, but only if the public can overcome the psychological challenges that stand in the way of widespread adoption.
Q13. What is the effect of the media coverage of AV accidents?
As with airplane crashes, the more disproportionate—and disproportionately sensational—the coverage that AV accidents receive, the more exaggerated people will perceive the risk and dangers of these cars in comparison to those of traditional human-driven ones.
Q14. What are the three main obstacles to the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles?
These begin with the need for an AV to decide how it will operate in situations where its actions could decrease the risk of harming its own passengers by increasing the risk to a potentially larger number of nonpassengers (e.g. pedestrians, other drivers).
Q15. What is the effect of algorithm aversion on AVs?
for AVs these reactions may be compounded by algorithm aversion6, the tendency for people to more rapidly lose faith in an erring decision-making algorithm than in humans making comparable errors.
Q16. What are the psychological challenges to AVs?
Psychological Challenge Suggested ActionsThe Dilemmas of Autonomous Ethics People are torn between how they want AVs to ethically behave; they morally believe the vehicles should operate under utilitarian principles, but prefer to buy vehicles that prioritize their own lives as passengers.
Q17. What is the way to educate the public about the risks of AVs?
Instead they should educate the public about the actual risks and, if moved to act, do so in a calculated way, perhaps by offering the public “fear placebos” 8—high-visibility, low-cost gestures that do the most to assuage the publics’ fears without undermining the real benefits that AVs might bring.