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Automobility: the coming use of fully-automated on-road vehicles

In a world that appears primarily to be motivated by a worship of the false idol of profit, there can be little doubt that the era of automated road vehicles is upon us. Indeed, such technologies have already begun to percolate into the bespoke vehicle domain and what becomes feasible in the special case is a prime candidate to penetrate into the more general circumstance. Within a period of mere decades, will it be the case that we will look back upon the manually controlled vehicle in the same manner that we now look upon the manually operated elevator, as a piquant anachronism or the particular domain of a specialized segment of the antiques trade? But, before we achieve even the first degree of true “automobility” we shall have to pass through a hybrid stage of development in which the role of the individual human driver will have to evolve substantively. During this phase of evolution, the population of vehicles on the road will be best described as `mixed equipage' (i.e., dynamically changing combinations of automated and manually controlled vehicles). Whether such differing capacity vehicles will be separated in either space (e.g., lanes devoted to automatic vehicles) or time (e.g., blocks of time when only manual vehicles are permitted on a specific roadway), is a question which must concern all who attend this important inception. If differing capacity vehicles are allowed to `mix,' a critical element of acceptance for example, will be how automated vehicles deal with drowsy, fatigued, or otherwise impaired drivers exercising traditional manual control. After exploring this specific strand of hybrid development and innovative forms of vehicle control from a human factors perspective, and briefly considering the parallel development of diverse robotic systems, I conclude my present discourse by asking the provocative question which may be expressed as follows. While we can develop such automated systems, should we in fact pursue this line of development? The latter questions are intimately bound up in the notions of safety, efficiency, choice, freedom, and our prospective overall social and individual quality of life. Whether these latter questions ever enter into the primary scientific and engineering discourse about the coming technological wave of automation I considered rather doubtful.