Abstract
This PhD thesis complicates the familiar-yet-simplistic industry imaginations of future autonomous mobility technologies, using a critical security lens and narrative methods to explore alternative, everyday futures. It does this in three parts. First, it identifies possible future trajectories for autonomous mobilities that go beyond limited industry imaginaries, through a round of stakeholder interviews. Second, it translates this research into a narrative-story form with the aim of enabling a type of ‘ethnographic access’ to complex and intangible futures. Third, it uses this narrative to animate discussions with participants from civil society organisations to upset the passive acceptance that appears necessary for industry imaginaries, and to explore the mess and complexity of the everyday insecurities and freedoms associated with autonomous mobility futures. The thesis thus complicates a dominant techno-solutionist framing within industry, government, and some parts of academia, arguing that a potential realignment of groups and their values to better align with industry-desired futures risks security conflicts arising, given a range of specific insecurities that combine to inform a broad response to several possible trajectories for autonomous mobilities, centred on concerns around agency and political insecurity. It further offers insight into the use of a short story as a tool for feeding research findings through a project’s stages, illustrating its ability to engage participants in reflecting upon sociotechnical futures, in complicating assumptions of dominant futures, and in providing a form of access to uncertain futures. The thesis also demonstrates the value of positive security as a critical lens in thinking through futures and responses to futures, and in exploring human-scale impacts. It consequently demonstrates a need for diverse, everyday perspectives to be heard and to shape futures, technologies, and applications, incorporating a greater range of values into decision calculi through an enablement-oriented, human-centric, longer-term approach to planning, designing, and developing technological futures.
Original language | English |
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Qualification | Ph.D. |
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Publication status | Unpublished - 2024 |
Keywords
- Autoinsecurity
- Automobility
- Autonomous vehicles
- Driverless car
- Autonomy
- Security
- Futures
- Foresight
- Creative methods
- Narrative futures
- Sociotechnical futures
- Emerging technologies
- Insecurity
- Mobility futures