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Psychological roadblocks to the adoption of self-driving vehicles

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From Nature Human Behaviour

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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. We discuss three: ethical dilemmas, overreactions to accidents, and the opacity of the cars’ decision-making algorithms — and propose steps towards addressing them.

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Fig. 1: A schematic example of the ethical trade-offs that autonomous vehicles will need to make between the lives of passengers and pedestrians3.

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Acknowledgements

Support from the ANR-Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse is gratefully acknowledged. I.R. is grateful for support from the Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Azim Shariff

  2. Toulouse School of Economics, Toulouse School of Management Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Toulouse-1 Capitole, Toulouse, France

    Jean-François Bonnefon

  3. The Media Lab, Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Iyad Rahwan

Authors
  1. Azim Shariff
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  2. Jean-François Bonnefon
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  3. Iyad Rahwan
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon or Iyad Rahwan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Shariff, A., Bonnefon, JF. & Rahwan, I. Psychological roadblocks to the adoption of self-driving vehicles. Nat Hum Behav 1, 694–696 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0202-6

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