scholarly journals The attachments of ‘autonomous’ vehicles

2021 ◽  
pp. 030631272110387
Author(s):  
Chris Tennant ◽  
Jack Stilgoe

The ideal of the self-driving car replaces an error-prone human with an infallible, artificially intelligent driver. This narrative of autonomy promises liberation from the downsides of automobility, even if that means taking control away from autonomous, free-moving individuals. We look behind this narrative to understand the attachments that so-called ‘autonomous’ vehicles (AVs) are likely to have to the world. Drawing on 50 interviews with AV developers, researchers and other stakeholders, we explore the social and technological attachments that stakeholders see inside the vehicle, on the road and with the wider world. These range from software and hardware to the behaviours of other road users and the material, social and economic infrastructure that supports driving and self-driving. We describe how innovators understand, engage with or seek to escape from these attachments in three categories: ‘brute force’, which sees attachments as problems to be solved with more data, ‘solve the world one place at a time’, which sees attachments as limits on the technology’s reach and ‘reduce the complexity of the space’, which sees attachments as solutions to the problems encountered by technology developers. Understanding attachments provides a powerful way to anticipate various possible constitutions for the technology.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-191
Author(s):  
Sarah Stutts ◽  
Kenneth Saintonge ◽  
Nicholas Jordan ◽  
Christina Wasson

Roadways are sociocultural spaces constructed for human travel which embody intersections of technology, transportation, and culture. In order to navigate these spaces successfully, autonomous vehicles must be able to respond to the needs and practices of those who use the road. We conducted research on how cyclists, solid waste truck drivers, and crossing guards experience the driving behaviors of other road users, to inform the development of autonomous vehicles. We found that the roadways were contested spaces, with each road user group enacting their own social constructions of the road. Furthermore, the three groups we worked with all felt marginalized by comparison with car drivers, who were ideologically and often physically dominant on the road. This article is based on research for the Nissan Research Center - Silicon Valley, which took place as part of a Design Anthropology course at the University of North Texas.


Author(s):  
Hallie M. Franks

In the Greek Classical period, the symposium—the social gathering at which male citizens gathered to drink wine and engage in conversation—was held in a room called the andron. From couches set up around the perimeter of the andron, symposiasts looked inward to the room’s center, which often was decorated with a pebble mosaic floor. These mosaics provided visual treats for the guests, presenting them with images of mythological scenes, exotic flora, dangerous beasts, hunting parties, or the specter of Dionysos, the god of wine, riding in his chariot or on the back of a panther. This book takes as its subject these mosaics and the context of their viewing. Relying on discourses in the sociology and anthropology of space, it argues that the andron’s mosaic imagery actively contributed to a complex, metaphorical experience of the symposium. In combination with the ritualized circling of the wine cup from couch to couch around the room and the physiological reaction to wine, the images of mosaic floors called to mind other images, spaces, or experiences, and, in doing so, prompted drinkers to reimagine the symposium as another kind of event—a nautical voyage, a journey to a foreign land, the circling heavens or a choral dance, or the luxury of an abundant past. Such spatial metaphors helped to forge the intimate bonds of friendship that are the ideal result of the symposium and that make up the political and social fabric of the Greek polis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-149
Author(s):  
Juhan Värk

AbstractOn 15 November 2012, at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping was elected the Party' general secretary, whereas he also became the chairman of the influential Central Military Commission. Too eager to wait to be inaugurated as President of the People' Republic of China in March 2013, the new national leader announced that in the following decade he is guided by the main objective of his predecessor Hu Jintao to double the prosperity of the people by the year 2020 and to keep the country' economy stable and growing fast. Unfortunately, it will be difficult for the new leader of China to implement his intentions, since, presumably, the country' new leadership will be from the older generation, hardliners, and, most importantly, politically conservative. But the difficulties lie in carrying out economic reforms because of rampant corruption and shadow banking in the central apparatus and in regions.According to the World Bank' analysis, China has become the world' largest economy. But the large expenditures to military reform and environmental protection are not sufficient for Xi Jinping to accomplish the goal to raise significantly the poor living standards of Chinese people. China has also faced difficulties in complying with the basic principles of its foreign policy, especially after the annexation of Crimea and its incorporation into the Russian Federation by China' strategic partner, Russia. In the past, China has carried out campaigns against “Americanization”, although with no tangible results. Thus, the leaders of today' China are faced with a number of dilemmas.


Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote

This concluding chapter argues that Germans themselves imagined the framework for a more stable political structure before the arrival of American troops. The reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany relied so much on the reconciliation of previously conflicting groups that “partnership” became its foundational ideology. The Germans who rebuilt the educational system in the Federal Republic, West Germany's intelligentsia, were the lions and lambs of the Weimar Republic in their youth. They lived through and participated in the social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts that tore apart German society before Hitler's rise. They also witnessed the Nazi attempt to overcome those conflicts, and some supported Hitler publicly before opposing him as he led Europe and the world into a catastrophic war. When this generation of Germans designed courses of education for the rising post-Nazi generations, they celebrated the ideal of partnership precisely to avoid the earlier conflicts.


Author(s):  
Tomislav Petrović ◽  
Miloš Milosavljević ◽  
Milan Božović ◽  
Danislav Drašković ◽  
Milija Radović

The application of intelligent transport systems (hereinafter ITSs) on roads enables continuous monitoring of road users during a whole year with the aim to collect good-quality data based on which the more complex analyses could be done, such as monitoring of certain traffic safety indicators. Automatic traffic counters are one of the most commonly implemented ITSs for collecting traffic flow parameters that are relevant for traffic management on state roads in Republic of Serbia. This paper presents one of the possible ways to collect, analyze and present data on road users’ speeds using automatic traffic counters, where certain traffic safety indicators are analyzed in terms of road users’ compliance with the speed limit on the road section from Mali Pozarevac to Kragujevac. Based on the analyses of data downloaded from automatic traffic counters, it is observed that an extremely high percentage of vehicles drive at speed higher than the speed limit, indicating clearly to higher traffic accident risk, as well as to the need for a tendency to implement speed management on roads using ITS in the forthcoming period.


This study inquiries into Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz (1968) and On the Road (1957) from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s nomadic war machine. It shifts from a rigorous scrutiny of Vanity of Duluoz for its general account of the Duluoz legend, Kerouac’s alter ego, to the study of On the Road for its more specific narrative of a certain period in Kerouac’s life. Being an iconic figure of rebellion and non-conformity in capitalist America during the postwar era, Kerouac’s literary works have a certain social and political magnitude that falls within the discourse of deconstructing orthodoxy and dogma. The study elucidates how Kerouac’s characters subvert the social norms and the state’s institutions in order to break free from pre-structured beliefs. The thesis of the article is to corroborate that such non-conformity and insubordination, exemplified in Kerouac’s autobiographical works, align with the nomadic characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine. By extension, it aims at presenting Kerouac as the Deleuzeguattarian nomad who creates nomadic characters that deterritorialize post-war America from within.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk-Jan Dekker

In an effort to fight climate change, many cities try to boost their cycling levels. They often look towards the Dutch for guidance. However, historians have only begun to uncover how and why the Netherlands became the premier cycling country of the world. Why were Dutch cyclists so successful in their fight for a place on the road? Cycling Pathways: The Politics and Governance of Dutch Cycling Infrastructure, 1920-2020 explores the long political struggle that culminated in today’s high cycling levels. Delving into the archives, it uncovers the important role of social movements and shows in detail how these interacted with national, provincial, and urban engineers and policymakers to govern the distribution of road space and construction of cycling infrastructure. It discusses a wide range of topics, ranging from activists to engineering committees, from urban commuters to recreational cyclists and from the early 1900s to today in order to uncover the long and all-but-forgotten history of Dutch cycling governance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Jolanta Brzykcy

The article is an analysis of the poetry of Gisella Lachman (1895–1969), poet of the “first wave” of Russian emigration, from the perspective of the poetics of space. The poet expressed her emigration experience (multiple changes of residence: Russia, Germany, Switzerland, USA) in her poems in spatial relations. They appear on different levels of the works’ morphology: in the construction of the lyrical “I”, in the organisation of the presented world, in the repertoire of motifs and the selection of poetic lexis and genre forms. Space plays a literal role in Lachman’s poetry; it is a representation of extra-literary reality, seen subjectively. It is also subject to metaphorisation, becoming a tool for expressing philosophical content. The poet creates not only a spatial model of the world, but also a spatial model of human life, which she perceives as a transit on the road to eternity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Kasmuri Selamat ◽  
Irma Handayani ◽  
Akhyar Hanif

The ideal leader is an expectation for every society in the world. Leadership is a relationship between the influence of the leader and the one being led. Leadership also functions to execute power to invite, influence, guide, mobilize and build other people to do something to achieve certain goals. To implement, Islam provides normative and philosophical bases on the principles of leadership. These principles include deliberation, fairness, gentleness, freedom of thought, synergy in building togetherness. The principles taught by Islam are in line with the thoughts of one of the Islamic philosophers, Ibn Khaldun. Furthermore, he emphasized that the social solidarity factor is crucial to become an ideal leader.


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