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In.: Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce (eds), Mobilities, Literature,
Culture (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2019
Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future
Robert Braun
Introduction
One of the key dilemmas of our times is understanding how technology shapes our social
present and socio-technological futures. Of course, this is not new. Philosophers, sociologists
and scholars in the science, technology and society (STS) field have, during the latter part of
the twentieth century, been concerned with trying to understand the constellation and
interplay between social and technological phenomena, as well as the process of the
production of collective knowledge on and about technology (Bijker 1995, Latour 1996,
2005, Jasanoff 2004, Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Recent developments in technology –
especially in digitalization, nano- and biotechnology, quantum computing and cyber-physical
systems – have brought these dialogues between technology and society to the forefront of
social science research. One of the areas concerning the confluence of advances in
technology and its potential impacts on society which is now highly topical is connected
autonomous mobility (Canzler and Knie 2016, Cohen 2012, Laurier and Dant 2012).
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The fascination with this new technology is seen in the White Paper on the Future of
Europe (EU WP), presented by the President of the European Commission in 2017 (EC
2017), which offers “connected car” use as an example of the sort of political decision
making that member states will have to deal with vis-a-vis the future direction of the EU. The
Commission is right in selecting connected car use to illustrate potential techno-social
futures: autonomous mobility (AM) is at the crossroads of many of the changes that
characterise current decision-making. The growing influence of cyber-physical systems, the
association and interaction between human and non-human agents, the multidimensional
connectedness of people, objects and algorithmic devices, and the potential opportunities of
quantum computing are just a few of recent technological developments with major societal
consequences that are brought together under the sign of AM. Also, from a social science
point of view, AM is at the intersection of both the “complexity turn” (Urry 2005) and
“mobilities turn” (Sheller and Urry 2006b, 2016, cf. critically Randell 2018), as well as
influential and emerging theories in the STS field such as action-network theory (ANT) and
social construction theory (SCOT). There is also a growing body of literature on the
transformational societal bearings of autonomous mobility, discussing the social effects as
well as moral and ethical implications of the transition to autonomous mobility, and the
economic, security, health, urban planning and policy impacts of “cyberised vehicles”
(Sheller 2004) or “mobility things” (Hansson 2015, Laurier and Dant 2012).
This chapter takes as its starting point a literary approach to societal and technological
interaction by looking at the first appearance of driverless cars in science fiction (SF)
publications at the beginning of the twentieth century. Science fiction, as a literary genre,
offers an alternative, speculative approach to thinking about the interplay of technology and
society. Works of science fiction offer a different kind of truth (Miller and Bennett 2008) or
‘transknowledges’ (Haraway 2013) to traditional expert based techno-optimism. I am not
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considering here the somewhat sensational dystopic science fiction inspired representations
of other worlds that influence much of the public discussions of techno-social futures today
(Gordon 2009): rather, depictions which are true “in a deeper sense of reflecting the enduring
realities of human existence, meaning and identity; true in the sense of illustrating
fundamental moral dilemmas faced by individuals and communities when confronted by new
and emerging technologies, and the struggles to grapple meaningfully with those dilemmas in
the ways only humans know how” (Miller and Bennett 2008, 600). Here, I will be looking at
two of the earliest science fiction stories that imagine an autonomous mobility world: David
H. Keller’s “The Living Machine” (1935) and Isaac Asimov’s “Sally” (1953). I have selected
these short stories because they were among the first texts to focus specifically on
autonomous or driverless cars thus providing a picture of the sociotechnical imaginaries of
the early twentieth century (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 2009). I will also mention other stories
that have driverless cars even if they are only part of the main narrative, like Miles Breuer’s
“Paradise and Iron” that first appeared in 1930, preceding Keller’s work.
The chapter is structured as follows: first, I discuss some of the characteristics of the
early years of the “system of automobility” (Urry 2004) as represented in these texts. I then
go on to consider the two early sci-fi texts introduced above and explore their techno-social
imaginaries in relation to autonomous mobility. After that, I turn to the contemporary
discourses surrounding the implementation of autonomous vehicles and consider the ways in
which they differ from those represented in early science fiction. This will be exemplified by
the representation of autonomous connected car futures in the White Paper on the Future of
the EU. Here I will argue that the difference works to validate the emerging re-
conceptualisation of autonomous vehicles in spatial and infrastructural terms, and to explain
why autonomous vehicles of this kind did not populate the pages of science fiction in the
early decades of sci-fi magazines and books. I will finish by arguing for the potentially
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positive and transformational nature of autonomous mobility if conceptualised sensitively
and in line with the insights subsequent upon the “mobilities-turn”(Urry 2008).
The early years of automobility
Altogether, very few works of early science fiction are devoted to the theme of autonomous
or driverless cars. This is perhaps surprising since, in the 1930s, when pulp magazines helped
popularise the sci-fi genre, robotics and machine-human interaction was a central theme of
popular sci-fi stories. Also, this was the era when cars and the socio-cultural impacts of the
auto world were already mainstreamed.
The “system of automobility” - the interconnected order of production, of
consumption, of mobile socialities and territorialities, of cultures and of uses of specific
resources locked-in and “path determined” by the steel-and-petroleum car (Urry 2004) - was
already in full swing by the 1930s, especially in America. The automobile allowed “the car-
driver to travel any time in any direction along the complex road systems of western societies
that link together most houses, workplaces and leisure sites” (Urry 2004, 28.). While the
concept of the car was closely connected to being a “machinistic hybridization of the car-
driver” (Urry 2006, Dant 2004), the twenties and thirties also saw experiments with cars that
did not have a driver. The idea of a driverless technology of mobility was therefore present
very early on in the evolution of the “car-system”. The first “driverless car”, the Haudina
radio controlled automobile, was introduced on McCook air force base in Dayton Ohio in
1921 (Green 1925). This was followed by the American Wonder, another distantly activated
experimental vehicle, which was trialled on the streets of New York in 1925, followed by
several other offshoots used for demonstration or advertising purposes in the 1930s (Kröger
2016). These vehicles were controlled by radio waves from other, following, vehicles or even
from an aeroplane.
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Technology and its social impacts were red-hot topics of the 1930s. During the Great
Depression and decade of economic insecurity, a fear emerged that machines would take the
jobs of the already threatened American worker. This anxiety extended specifically to driving
and drivers. The taxi driver market was flooded with despairing men looking for work as the
rest of the public was heavily cutting back on expenses. In 1934, taxi drivers went on strike
because of their plummeting salaries and long working hours. The strike soared out of
control, leading to violent confrontations across the city between taxi drivers and the police
(Hodges 2007). The last thing drivers wanted was an autonomous car that would take away
the last remaining opportunity to earn money. The word “robot”, an invention of the Czech
writer Karel Capek in 1920, originated from the Czech word “Robota” (forced labor) and was
exemplified in Capek’s stage play about robots being created to do the work of humans. The
play premiered in New York in 1922, ran for 184 performances, and was widely known by
the 1930s.
Another theme that was connected to mechanized mobility was the realisation that
human error induced danger on the roads. The number of annual road casualties in the years
between 1924 and 1934 almost doubled (Miller 2015); the single biggest increase in one
decade in the ‘century of the car’ in America. This prompted General Motors (GM) to
commission a short film on vehicle safety, The Safest Place, in 1935. The film shows a car
with no driver maintaining traffic regulations in a textbook manner. The film does not aim to
present a version of a technically feasible driverless car, however; it does suggest that the
only ones responsible for the accidents are the drivers. Automobiles are depicted as smooth
and safe operators in perfect harmony and rhythm with their environment. Cars, then, are
presented as “perfect machines”, not moral agents; all the risk and potential for harm rests
with the human being at the wheel (Kröger 2016).
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Autonomous vehicles in early science fiction
Driverless cars duly appear in science fiction for the first time on the pages of Miles Breuer’s
“Paradise and Iron” (Breuer 2008) around the same time as the first experiments with
driverless or ‘distant driven’ automobiles took place. Breuer’s story originally appeared in
Amazing Stories Quarterly, one of the leading advocates of the new genre of popular science
fiction stories in 1930. Here, the whole narrative is framed in terms of the coexistence and
conflict of autonomous machines and humans as well as the dystopic impacts thereof.
Autonomous cars are depicted as an illustration of the robotic world populated by
autonomous vehicles (ships, cars), working machines and their robot creators, all of which
are manipulated by the “Electrical Brain” preparing for a showdown with humanity. While
the storyline foreshadows many of the tropes of later SF by exploring the dystopia of robotic
machines (the loss of human interaction, the potential obliteration of humankind by machines
and the horror of total robotic manufacturing) my focus in this paper is specifically on the
socio-technological futures represented by autonomous mobility. The autonomous vehicles in
“Paradise and Iron” are some of the first glimpses to the dystopic world of automatisation and
robot operated social systems.
Meanwhile, the first sci-fi text to focus entirely on the idea of the autonomous car was
a short story by a popular science fiction writer (and psychiatrist) of the time, David H.
Keller, called “The Living Machine”. In this short story, first published in the 1935 edition of
Wonder Stories, Keller is inspired by the recent appearance of the driverless car. The story is
about the ultimate mainstreaming of the autonomous car idea:
Old people began to cross the continent in their own cars. Young people found the
driverless car admirable for petting. The blind for the first time were safe. Parents
found they could more safely send their children to school in the new car than in their
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old cars with a chauffeur. In one year, every other make of car faced failure. [..] In
five years America depended on fifty million automatic cars for its transportation.
(Keller 1935, 1471)
The conflict here is presented in primarily business terms. An inventor creates the
autonomous car and sells the idea to one of the big automobile manufacturers of the country.
With the societal benefits of the driverless car, the manufacturer quickly dominates the
automobile market and sells 50 million cars in a matter of five years. One of the competing,
but sidelined, car manufacturers is also the biggest distributor of petroleum throughout
America. In order to win back consumers’ trust in human operated automobiles (and regain
its market share), the company mixes cocaine with the fuel in order to make the cars
irresponsible and strip them of their key competitive advantage - safety. As the cars are fed
the new fuel they become dangerous operators: they collide with each other, they knock
people down, and they create a world in which no one is any longer safe from the drug crazed
vehicles. By now, the inventor of the car has serious reservations about their living,
humanoid properties and proposes to stop manufacturing them – just as another entrepreneur
has invented a new battery that will enable cars to “run ten thousand miles and be recharged
for ten dollars” (Keller 1935, 1511).
Keller’s story was an almost ‘stand-alone’ act of imagining an autonomous-car
populated future. His narrative is straightforward: autonomous cars create a safe mobility
environment (“In spite of the great increase in the number of automobiles, there was a
constantly decreasing number of accidents and death” (1471)); offer mobility access to
several disadvantaged social groups (“Old people began to cross the continent […] the blind
for the first time were safe” (1471)); mobility is made easy and comfortable (“Young people
found the driverless car admirable for petting” (1471)); and more miles could be travelled
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without the “empty time” normally associated with travel (“the idea of sitting still any length
of time in one place was simply intolerable to them” (1471)). The idea of the automation,
meanwhile, spills over to other areas of everyday life such as the home and workplace (“They
wanted to make things, to use machinery, to drive mobile engines. The housekeepers prided
themselves on having a hundred electrical servants in the home” (1472)).
Automation, however, comes at a price in Keller’s story: “In New York alone three
hundred taxi men were killed before the rioting started by the introduction of the new car as a
driverless taxi” (1471). Keller’s narrative, as discussed in the introduction to the text,
encapsulates the hopes, fears, problems and opportunities of his time. Cars are dangerous;
driverless cars are safe. The system of traditional automobility excludes certain social groups
– the old and the young – so they are actively assisted by the invention of the driverless
vehicle. These AMs create a habitable environment for travel - not necessarily the
comforting “cocoon” John Urry describes it in his article “Inhabiting the car“ (Urry 2006) -
but more like the 1950s advertisements of happy families travelling in the car and playing a
board game.
I now turn my attention to the the well-known sci-fi author, Isaac Asimov, whose
story, “Sally”, was first published in 1953. His story is of a rather different kind to Keller’s
inasmuch as he is less interested in the world populated by autonomous vehicles than
fascinated by what happens to the ‘intelligent beings’ after they have “served their time”. The
action is set in a ‘retirement home’ for cars, where the first generation of AVs are expected to
spend the rest of their lives in peace. The retirement home undertakes to treat the autonomous
cars “humanely” at the end of their “life”, but an entrepreneur comes up with the idea to
place the cars’ “automatic positronic systems” in the chassis of new cars and re-sell them for
profit. The warden of the home, Jake Folkers, turns the idea of re-using the cars down;
however, the entrepreneur persists and uses force to get hold of the cars. However, the cars -
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as living, feeling and eugenic creatures - unite and save themselves, finally killing the
intruder. In Asimov’s autonomous mobility universe - although we admittedly know very
little about the world outside of the retirement home - the “system of automobility” as
conceptualized by John Urry (2004) seems still to be very much intact: the car as
manufactured object, the automobile as a product for individual consumption, the
infrastructure of the car “industry” and operation, the private mode of mobility, the culture
with its symbolism of “locked-in steel-and-petroleum”, are all unchanged. Both stories focus
more on the technology than on the social environment they create or impact upon. While
Keller’s social world is influenced positively by the mainstreaming of autonomous vehicles –
travel impaired groups gain access; safety is increased; travel is smooth and easy – there
appear fewer practical benefits in Asimov’s autonomous universe. Asimov’s cars are
aestheticised – they are beautiful objects – and humanised: they have names, show emotions,
communicate and cooperate with humans and machines alike but it is unclear how they will
benefit the social realm in practical terms.
In Keller’s story, then, autonomous mobility creates a techno-social future that makes
everyday life easier for “users”, but there are ramifications of this autonomous technology
beyond its use as transport that are dystopic.
Think what would be the result if these living automobiles started to do their own
thinking and united tried to form a ruling race? Of course that sounds impossible. But
you have had the same idea. And with an absolutely new force of nature, how can we
tell what will happen? We cannot, and so I am going to stop. Babson wants to put my
invention into other machines, for example, into the cotton mills of the South and
England. That would mean the unemployment of five million men and women and
their certain starvation. (Keller 1935, 1472)
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Both authors imagine autonomous vehicles as humanoid creatures and as moral
agents: they act, think and behave like humans. This is more evident in Sally, but also
represented, as indicated in the title, in the “Living Machine”. Keller’s cars behave like
humans when in receipt of psychotropic substances; not only do they get high but they also
become irresponsible and irrational; in other words, they are ‘living’ but no longer thinking
machines
Keller’s autonomous mobility world nevertheless depicts a future not dissimilar to
that conceived of at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the “real” deployment of
autonomous cars imminent, as forecast in the EU White Paper on the Future of Europe,
access is improved and safe and harmonious urban environments are imagined in which
autonomous vehicles carry people seamlessly from place to place (Braun 2016, Cohen 2012,
DiClemente 2014). Both sci-fi authors’ imagination revolves around moral questions: what
happens when machines as moral agents make moral decisions, for the better or the worse?
Both authors also go beyond the current discussions on responsibility and liability, or the
modern renderings of the ‘trolley problem’ (i.e., the ethical model of moral decision-making
when a runaway tram may kill one person or five on a railway depending on the choice of the
onlooker to alter its way), its variations, moral modelling, moral free riding and its policy
implications (Thomson 1985, Bonnefon, Shariff, and Rahwan 2016, Goodall 2014, Foot
1978, Walker-Smith 2015). Moreover both authors are concerned with what, today, is at
stake as the result of the elision of the human/non-human binary. The critical question,
however, as in much of the science-fiction literature to follow, is what happens if machines
become smarter than people and will not ‘accept’ the rules men prescribe to them. While
Folkers, the warden of the ‘retirement home’, disagrees with the intruder and wants to stop
the violence to the cars, once the machines kill the aggressor he becomes seriously concerned
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about the prospect that cars can make moral decisions about matters of life and death and
may, eventually, may turn against their masters. The same applies to the inventor of the
‘living machines’: he plans to stop creating new ones and to take his secret to the grave
based on similar considerations.
The techno-social imaginary of early sci-fi authors writing about such potentially
transformational technology as autonomous cars is, in some ways, similar to the techno-
imagination of the present era. Autonomous cars are represented as ready-made technological
artefacts replacing other technologies without entering into interaction or discourse with the
social universe they are part of. Neither Keller’s nor Asimov’s socio-political environment is
a world of post-automobility: this is still very much the era when automobility - of all kinds -
is being celebrated and the vision of new autonomous ‘humanoid’ cars is conceived as part of
that system. These new humanoid cars are still manufactured along traditional lines: they are
made of steel, run on petroleum, operate within the same infrastructural “system”, share
cultural symbolism (to an extent), and reproduce a similar ‘passengering’ (Laurier et al.
2008) (if not driving) experience. Similarly, the interior or exterior of the cars do not
change; nor do other elements of the system. In both texts explored here, the problem is seen
to be stemming from the ability of humanoid machines to make ethical decisions and, once
again, this echoes the main concerns of STS scholars and policy researchers in the present.
In the aestheticised universe of Asimov, even the gendered symbolism of car culture,
with which we are familiar features (Jain 2006). Cars are figured as objects of beauty -
“skittish” and sexually inviting - while men are ‘intruders’: not only into the retirement home
where the cars are stored, but also into the sexually private universe of the female car-body.
Sally has her privacy (“Automatic lock. She’s got a sense of privacy, Sally has.” p. 33), but
Mr. Gellhorn, the intruder, forcibly takes her for a ride. She automatically locks her doors
when the intruder strikes, but is then ‘raped’ through the open top.
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He stepped back three or four paces, then quickly, so quickly I couldn't take a step to
stop him, he ran forward and vaulted into the car. He caught Sally completely by
surprise, because as he came down, he shut off the ignition before she could lock it in
place. For the first time in five years, Sally's motor was dead. […] ‘There.’ he said. ‘I
think I did her a lot of good.’(Asimov 1995, 33)
All the elements of twentieth-century gendered culture are present: notably, the driver-
intruder man and the victimised woman including the way in which the latter is made
responsible for her sexual assault: “A car with a sense of privacy shouldn't go around with its
top down” (p. 33). No irony is present.
From this discussion it may be seen that he techno-social imaginary of the ‘system of
automobility’ was already ‘locked in’ by the 30s. On this point it is of anecdotal interest that
Asimov imagined the first commercially available autonomous car, the Mat-O-Mot, to be
deployed in 2015. This frames the emerging world of auto-mobility nicely. Our everyday
lives of “traveling, dwelling and socialising” (Thrift 2008, Urry 2000, 59) begins with the
emergence of the system of automobility in the 1930s and is assumed to end in the 2010s
with the appearance of Asimov’s Mat-O-Mot, the autonomous car that foreshadows today’s
driverless automobiles. This leads us to inquire why the autonomous automobile was such a
compelling concept in the sociotechnical imagination of these early sci-fi thinkers, and what
it will take for AVs to signal the end of the “system of automobility” rather than simply being
an extension of it. In the concluding parts of this chapter I will try to answer these questions.
Apparatuses of automobility
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In recent years, STS scholars have added new layers of complexity to how we envisage our
techno-social futures. Jasanoff and Kim (2015) recommend that we attend to ‘sociotechnical
imaginaries’ (STIs): “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed
visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and
social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology”
(Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 6). STIs evolve over time and also compete with each other; they
affect innovation processes, policy decisions as well as the literary imagination.
Sociotechnical imaginaries, as Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 123) in their original paper argued,
“are instrumental and futuristic: they project visions of what is good, desirable, and worth
attaining for a political community; they articulate feasible futures.” Automobility is a prime
candidate for a rigorous interrogation in terms of such imaginaries not least because it is a
deeply political arrangement “entail[ing] patterns of power relations and visions of a
collective ‘good life’ which are at the same time highly contestable and contested” (Böhm et
al. 2006, 4-5). As Michel Foucault (1984) famously prophesised almost 40 years ago, the era
of the modern is above all the epoch of space. Automobility involves complex social, spatial
and cultural interrelations (Featherstone, Thrift, and Urry 2005) as well as creating
‘dreamscapes’ that rearrange socialites (Urry 2004, Jasanoff and Kim 2015).
However, it is evident that early twentieth-century sci-fi stories of autonomous
mobility approach their subject in a manifestly non-spatial way: they conceptualise
technology purely instrumentally, leaving the social and psychological aspects of the spatial
and the political unaccounted for. The world of these SF writers may therefore be said to be
‘flat’ and two-dimensional; in the minds of the two early sci-fi writers discussed here,
automobility had not yet emerged as a sociotechnical imaginary per se; it was not yet figured
as a shared spatial or political vision of a desirable social future, nor one that is held
collectively by the people and institutions that depend upon it. These writers experience and
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depict the automobile as a technological artefact in a vaguely conceived social context rather
than a social phenomenon which is co-constructed (Bijker 1995) or co-produced (Jasanoff
2004) by and with society. Automobility is not yet conceived as “a self-organizing
autopoietic, nonlinear system that will spread world-wide, and which includes cars, car-
drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs” and
which will restructure time and space, ‘locking in’ “social life in to the mode of mobility that
automobility generates and presupposes” (Urry 2004, 27). Nor is it yet a ‘regime’ producing
“truth effects about driving or self-driven subjects” (Böhm et al. 2006, 8-9). This being the
case, then how are we to conceptualize what we see emerging in the pages of these early
visions of an autonomous automobility future?
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, we can see that the whole story of
“The Living Machine” revolves around the emerging hegemony of the car system even if this
has yet to be brought to consciousness. The story is that of a power struggle between different
players for the future of automobility: the manufacturers of automobiles, the innovators, the
policy makers and the oil producers are all heavily invested in the outcome. In Sally, it is all
about taking the automatic positronic systems of the autonomous cars, placing them in a new
chassis, and then reselling them for a profit - once again involving makers, innovators, policy
makers and entrepreneurs. In this regard, it is tempting to see the emergence of automobility
less as a developing sociotechnical imaginary, as previously discussed, but as an Ideological
Sociotechnical Apparatus (following Althusser (1971)) driven by capitalist institutions. The
concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, as we have seen, focuses on visions of sociotechnical
futures being collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed; however,
in Keller’s work we see how these imaginaries become privately fought over and
institutionally stabilised. It is the brute forces of power interests, driven by economic greed,
that both animates the emergence of this early technology and also uses the technology to
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foster wider economic and ideological interests. I have therefore elected to turn to Louis
Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses in an attempt to demonstrate the
interplay of technology, society and power in these representations of the ’car-system’ in the
early part of the twentieth century.
In his landmark essay, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs) (1971),
Althusser explains ideology as an ‘imaginary assemblage’ in which social groups internalise
and reproduce the relations which condition their existence. Althusser also claims that this
representation is always material (as opposed to ‘ideal’) and becomes visible through
practice: “existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the
last instance by the ideological apparatus. Ideology therefore exists in material ideological
apparatuses that prescribe material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices
exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief”
(Althusser 1971, 129). According to Althusser, common-sense beliefs often come to be seen
as “obvious” through the process of what he calls ‘interpellation’, whereby subjects are
positioned in such a way that they freely incorporate ideologies of various kinds into their
conceptions of the self. Ideological State Apparatuses may therefore be thought of as
“realities” that present themselves to the observer through distinct and specialized
institutions. Institutions in the Althusserian sense are not only organizational structures such
as the Church or the education system, but also what, following Foucault (1995, 2009) and
Bourdieu (1993), we think of as everyday discourses (such as romantic love and a wide range
of tastes and prejudices). ISAs invisibly coerce (‘hail’/‘interpellate’) subjects to follow
certain material practices, rituals and create socialities that then will ‘reinforce’ their
subjectivities.
In the fight between the car manufacturers, the automobile entrepreneur, the oil
producer and the innovator we arguably see the emergence of automobility as an ideological
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(sociotechnical) apparatus. This is exemplified by Keller’s and Asimov’s imaginary of
automobility which is spatially and socially “flat” as they limit their focus to the material
practices (i.e. the battle of economic interests) governed by a material ritual (i.e the market)
and the interpellation of the individual car-user in the manner outlined by Althusser; in other
words, while the texts astutely capture the way in which the ‘car system’ had become so
powerful, they failed to grasp what was needed to turn their dystopian fantasies of an AV
future into one that would work. Automobility is not yet a true ‘imaginary’ as it is does not
project visions of the good, the desirable, and what is worth attaining for the community.
Post-automobility
When we turn to the discourses surrounding the production of present day autonomous
vehicles, by contrast, we see that their main feature is not their driverless nature but rather
their hyper-connectedness. In the 2017 EU White Paper (WP), a political vision based on the
current technology innovation landscape, “connected cars” are presented as “illustrative
snapshots” of the EU’s political and technological future and the decision-making that will
entail. Although the staging of connected autonomous mobility technology is not as detailed
as in the early sci-fi works, this is one of the first political descriptions of an autonomous
mobility prospect presented as something that really is going to happen as opposed to a
hypothetical technological future. Autonomous vehicles are conceptualised in the WP as fully
connected “cyberised vehicles”: in one of the scenarios (“Doing less more effectively”) “[a]
European Telecoms Authority has the power to free up frequencies for cross-border
communication services, such as the ones needed for the use of connected cars across
Europe” (EC 2017, 23). Autonomous mobility is thus presented as hyper-connected
autonomous mechanised movement: algorithm controlled multi-dimensionally connected cars
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flow “seamlessly across Europe thanks to EU-wide rules and the work of an EU enforcement
agency” (EC 2017, 25)
According to the EU WP, and other representations of our present autonomous
mobility future (Bertoncello 2015, Canzler and Knie 2016), AVs are self-driving, smart
“mobility-things” [“the socio-material mechanism for getting the job done” (Hansson 2015)]
that operate according to safety-critical functions such as cameras, onboard sensors, and other
telecommunications, as well as algorithm and computer-driven infrastructure, in order to
respond to safety critical situations as well as to utilise automated navigation strategies. They
also acquire, and share, real-time information with an extended time horizon and improved
awareness of distance that is beyond human capacity and includes complex technical and
navigation information, remote diagnostics, maintenance, and safety warnings to provide
flawless operation. Further, the AVs of the twenty first century have been conceptualised as
mobile spaces connected to every other space possible. AVs are multi-dimensionally
connected to other people, to other spaces (roadside infrastructure, buildings, other vehicles)
as well as to technological narratives (datasets of the past already interpreted by human or
artificial intelligence). These vehicles, as opposed to the ‘living machines’ imagined by the
novelists of the 1930s, are both spatially and kinetically conceived: they move through space,
and are hyper-connected to multiple other spaces through the networks of flows (Castells
2009). AVs are thus on their way to becoming part of a new post-driver/car system; they
may be thought of as multi-fueled, ultra-light, smart, de-privatised, multimodal and multi-
dimensionally interconnected mechanised autonomous moving spaces (Urry 2004). In
addition, they have the potential to rearrange our existing topographies of power; AVs do not
require a driver, thus space is not organised around a designated and marked position of
function and/or power. There is no one person in control, no specific human agency behind
the movement, choice of direction, stopping, pulling away, turning and accelerating. And
18
there is no specific human agency behind the interconnections and intersections of movement
either: etiquettes are reorganised, interruptions reconnected and topographies of disruptions
reordered. A new phenomenology of driving and passengering (Thrift 2008, Laurier et al.
2008) as well as a novel “automotive consciousness” therefore emerges (Pearce 2016).
It is, however, important to recognise that there are many types and forms of AVs
being experimented with at the present time: some transporting people (one, few or many);
some transporting goods or the things that people would normally carry. As Mimi Sheller
(2004) indicated, already more than a decade ago, “vehicular cyberisation” has been
happening at a growing pace since the converging infrastructures of transportation and
information were created in the last decade of the previous century. A ‘post-driver/car’
autonomous mobility system potentially transforms the ‘car’ into something quite ‘other’: the
‘path-dependence’, as well as the ‘lock-in’ of the steel-and-petroleum infrastructure
associated with traditional automobility is finally displaced. New materials, new forms of
propellant, new interior and exterior designs will emerge, radically reconceptualising people-
and object-carrying ‘mobility things’ as well as rearranging the desires, inhabitations,
socialities that accompany them (Urry 2004, Sheller and Urry 2000, Sheller 2004, Sheller and
Urry 2006a).
As we have seen, Keller and Asimov, by contrast, imagined autonomous cars as
simply new technology: autonomous humanoid agents thinking, acting and moving along the
‘scapes’ that had already come to be associated with “system of automobility” (Sheller 2004).
A driverless car, they imagined, is simply a car without a driver. It is now clear, however,
that the transformational nature of the autonomous connected vehicle is not its driverlessness,
but rather its potential to transition from the ‘system of automobility’ to the radically re-
conceptualised social and geographical realm of post-automobility. Post-car, autonomous,
interconnected mobility may therefore be theorised as a techno-social ecosystem in which the
19
car-driver hybrid assemblage, embedded in fluid but systemic interconnections (Urry 2004),
gives way to a more “liquid” arrangement of mobility populated by interconnected human–
non-human mobile hybrids (Bauman 2007, Sheller 2004). Shared urban spaces, for example,
may soon be populated by self-driving cyberised mobile “things” carrying people, objects
and information in a radically new, fluid ontological operation. Nevertheless, the
materialisation of post-automobility will also require the emergence of a radically new
(sociotechnical) mobility imaginary with the ability to “interpellate” twentieth-century
subjects into new ways of being, or becoming, mobile subjects.
Meanwhile, this twenty-first century conceptualisation of autonomous vehicles may
offer answers as to why the driverless car did not continue to capture the imagination of the
early writers of science fiction. Lacking the fully “cyberised” networks of post-automobility,
driverless or autonomous cars could not be envisaged as socially or technologically
transformational. These fictional prototypes were imagined simply as ‘technology fixes”,
offering solutions to some of the social challenges created by the first generation of cars
(such as their risk and danger). However, what was then seen as the the more fascinating
aspect of human-machine interaction - namely the potential for the machine to replace its
maker - did not necessarily need to be linked to transport; other forms of robots – humanoid
autonomous agents – were widely fantasised. Very soon, autonomous cars were no longer
seen as the most interesting socio-technical SF fantasy and disappeared from the cultural
imaginary until they re-emerged in SF literature and film in the seventies and eighties – but
that is another story entirely.
20
Conclusion: towards a new politics of autonomous mobility
Since early sci-fi writers imagined autonomous cars as independent autonomous agents and
not as hyper-connected cyberised “mobility things” they missed one of the key aspects of
autonomous mobility: the politics of autonomous hyper-connected space.
“Mobility things”, driver-machine hybrids or autonomous artefacts, are deeply
political in the sense that they are symptomatic of the way in which social relations,
involving the production and distribution of power with the ability to transform inevitable
social conflicts, quickly settle into socially acceptable and institutionalised hierarchies and
oppositions. Mobility, as the ‘mobilities turn’ has shown, often lies at the centre of such
conflicts as well as their potential transformation; it is also a resource that is differently
accessed - “one person’s speed is another person’s slowness”, writes Tim Cresswell (2010,
21) - and therefore liable to be fought over on a number of levels. For Cresswell, indeed, the
politics of mobility is multifaceted and made up of: (1) constellations of material movement –
distance, speed and frequency; (2) representations – the discourse, rites and symbolism of
mobility; and (3), the practices of mobility – embodiment, comfort and autonomy (Cresswell
2010, 22). This account of the politics of mobility relates closely to my own description of
the workings of the ideological sociotechnical apparatus: that is, the ‘imaginary assemblage’
associated with the material practices of automotive movement, and governed by a material
ritual of certain discourses, rites and symbolism attached to the ‘car’, will determine the
imaginary of the car user and her ‘imagined’ sociotechnical future. Moreover, the “regime”
of traditional automobility is tenacious and difficult to “shake off” (Böhm et al. 2006, 11).
Indeed, the ideological sociotechnical apparatus of automobility is in full force at
moments of sociotechnical transition such as our own, just as it was when “The Living
Machine” and “Sally” were written. This may be illustrated by the competing discourses and
imaginaries at work in the European Union’s vision for the “Future of Europe”. Following
21
up on the White Paper (discussed at the beginning of this paper), EC President Jean-Claude
Juncker presented his own vision of the future in his 2017 State of the Union speech (Juncker
2017). One of the key political initiatives he proposed was “to make our industry stronger
and more competitive” and to invest further in “the world-class products that give us our
edge, like our cars. I am proud of our car industry” (Juncker 2017, 3. my emphasis). While
there are clearly multiple imaginaries implicit here - including ones propagated by believers
of a sustainable, low-carbon, less mobile techno-future (Buehler et al. 2017, Geels et al.
2017) - it would appear that the socio technical apparatus that created the first-generation
“car system” and informed the pages of the early twentieth-century SF writers is still largely
intact; the focus is still on the cars per se rather than the thinking needed to create a post-
automobility future.
If the conditions necessary for true post-automobility were realised, autonomous
vehicles would have the capacity to rearrange gendered motions, representations, and
practices ‘on the move’. The new algorithmic rhythm of the road would, for example, reorder
gendered biases: speed, distance, route would be defined by the system and the hyper-
connected interplay of its participants, not by the gendered individual. Autonomous vehicles,
thus conceptualised - and unlike “Sally” - are spaces, not the adjuncts of people; ‘meanings’
would be created by the system’s multifold inter-connectedness, by the users passing through
its portals, with the vehicles detecting data that these individuals wished to share. Mobility
practices would be recreated by the new spatial, temporal, sensory, bodily interplay of
subjects walking, driving, passengering, wandering, carrying, pushing, placing and swarming
through a maze of other bodies, “mobility things”, objects and their related infrastructures
(Cochoy 2009, Harman 2009, Jensen 2013, Brembeck et al. 2016). In a hyperconnected post-
driver/car automobility universe, the manmade synchronized rhythm of urban mobility would
give way to (partially) algorithmic synchronization of the hybrid system of humans, machines
22
and infrastructure, taking control out of the hands of drivers and their machines. Shared rules
and common sets of communication tools and mechanisms would be replaced by cyber-
physical systems rearranging socialites and what Doreen Massey had described as power-
geometries (Massey 2005). The social construction of the private and the public would be
fundamentally challenged. However, even with all these material changes in place, there is
the likelihood that the politics of mechanised mobility would continue to be ordered by the
existing ideological sociotechnical apparatus of automobility such is the tenacity of this way
of thinking. The autonomous automobility future imagined by Keller and Asimov was
politically “flat” because it originated from the same ideological sociotechnical apparatus as
traditional car-driver hybrid automobility, and - at the present moment - this is where
Europe’s future is stalled also. For the politics of automobility to be truly transformed, first
the ideological sociotechnical apparatus needs to change; new power arrangements, material
practices, and rituals of the discourse - along with their associated rites and symbolism -
need to emerge.
The White Paper on the Future of Europe is a poignant current illustration of this
impasse. Indeed, the EU approach to connected autonomous mobility is quite similar to
Keller’s or Asimov’s conceptualisations of autonomous machines in many respects. Although
the EU’s cars of the future are not seen as humanoid and/or living creatures, they are
nevertheless envisaged as “moving seamlessly” across Europe within a “system of
automobility” which is merely technical in nature and invention; there is no understanding of
the change which must also take place in the social and cultural realm for such technology to
be meaningfully embraced and deployed. In the texts of the today’s current European policy-
makers, as in the techno-social fictions of early twentieth-century SF writers, the vision of
connected vehicle autonomous mobility is ultimately non-transformational as the ideological
sociotechnical apparatuses informing the vision remain fixed and unchallenged. Envisioning
23
a genuinely new sociotechnical future requires the currently silenced alternative ideologies
animating technology to be embraced by the citizens of Europe. The vision of a fluid,
seamless, hyper-connected post-automobility system will be socially and politically
transformational only if the ideological sociotechnical apparatuses which inform it change as
well.
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