Novel Autonomous: Coronavirus could hide old tensions in the driverless cars’ emergence.

Before COVID-19 took center stage, popular news rang with impending promises of autonomous vehicles. It seemed they would benefit everyone, poised to help businesspeople work en route to the office, decrease traffic and emissions with less time in transit for the average passenger, and provide more equal, if not equitable, access to transportation. The presence of COVID-19 is accelerating what was likely to be a more protracted process of emergence. Necessary measures like delivering supplies or transporting test samples are becoming dependent on immediate use of autonomous vehicles, enabled by unusually fast-paced legislation. But the pace of these changes, through a discourse of conflict, erode public attention from the unequal relations that have plagued the taxi and ridehail industry for years, and provide a linguistic and imaginative platform from which to rethink the necessity of drivers. The current pandemic affords an opportunity to examine emergence in real time, to consider the tradeoffs being made as we are in the midst of them, rather than in retrospect.

I recently attended a workshop, under Chatham House Rule, on the future of the driverless car. The meeting was rapidly shifted to digital as cases of COVID-19 began to rise in cities like New York and Boston. Yet the subject matter was seemingly unfazed by circumstance, adapting in format but not topically. The content was geared toward the widespread development and adoption of small driverless vehicle fleets more akin to taxis than personally owned vehicles. It was as if the technological futures being discussed were discrete promises, operating above and outside the pandemic.

The moment was an interesting one — a convergence of past infrastructural systems, present coronavirus-shaped circumstance, and future promise of what autonomous technology would do for society. Yet the lack of COVID-informed conversation illustrated how emerging technology sectors position themselves separate from human affairs. One participant echoed an idea already circulating, that the presence of COVID-19 demonstrates yet another reason why society’s transition to autonomous cars is necessary. The position suggests that eliminating the driver eliminates a key point of transmission by positioning the driver not as a victim of the virus but as a perpetrator of its spread. The narrative of conflict, naming this a “war” on coronavirus, transmutes drivers from accessories to driving to a public health threat. The removal of the driver becomes necessary and the solution presented to fill the transportation void is the autonomous car.

Companies like Uber and Lyft have withdrawn promised support for imperiled drivers, relying instead on the “CARES” Act. By abdicating responsibility for their employees yet demanding they continue driving, these companies are, in effect, treating their fleet as if it were already driverless.

This idea has moved into public discourse via mainstream news and legislative bodies. Both are taking up the call to implement autonomous cars as a tool to “fight” the coronavirus. The House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce positions COVID-19 as “proof” of autonomous cars’ necessity. This kind of legislative support feeds back into technology sectors. The driverless delivery vehicle company NURO has joined Waymo LLC on an exclusive list of driverless cars able to operate without safety drivers in the San Francisco Bay area. Driverless vehicles have been deployed in Florida to transport COVID-19 tests across the Mayo Clinic’s campus. In China, two sets of rival companies, Apollo with Neolix and JD with Nankai, have partnered to deploy fleets of driverless cars to infected areas of major cities, including Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Tools like the autonomous taxi should be used to their safest capacity, especially in ways not previously considered. And though COVID-related changes like stay at home orders have hampered safety driver participation, it has by no means halted the integration of driverless systems into society. Yet a leap to autonomous transportation is occurring in ways and with such speed it threatens to erode and silence pre-COVID concerns. When was the last time you heard about Uber’s sexual harassment report? Revisited taxi driver suicides over inescapable debt? Or considered how rideshare algorithms and driver decisions prioritized people by race, ethnicity, and sexual identity?

Capturing the driver as “villain” positions many of these issues as no longer necessary. Public sentiment is less sympathetic to villains, and assault against the driver or passenger is solved if one of them (the driver) is not in the car. Racial, cultural, or sexual biases pinned solely on drivers are resolved as the driver is removed from the equation. But these “solutions” are scapegoats that do not address the structures that have enabled an environment of inequality and economic precarity. In a moment where social distancing and shelter-in-place are the new normal, talking about problems of the “old” driver-led transportation system does not seem relevant.

If history has taught us anything, it is that the inequalities built into the for-hire transportation system will re-emerge, because the relations between institutions and the public remain unchanged. By not addressing unequal relations to transportation, we doom it to a similarly unequal rebirth within whatever transportation system emerges from this crisis. During the Second World War and in the 1960s and 1970s during the War on Crime, for-hire transportation became an extension of institutional authority and prioritization (typically of white middle-class citizens). On both occasions, the rhetoric of war and conflict overrode contemporary concerns of treatment, inequality, and access.

The rhetoric of a “war” on COVID-19 can be a productive rallying cry, a way to assuage fears and mobilize society. But the cost of moving at such a speed is again facilitating erasure. It erodes indicators of systemic problems in the for-hire transportation system that will likely re-emerge, inaccessibly blackboxed within institutional priorities and automated systems. And it facilitates a removal of drivers in such a way that they have little recourse to respond.

While the presence of the coronavirus has sped up these changes, it has also rendered them more visible, and linked in ways previously not accessible. We have an opportunity to make technological transitions more aware of their societal costs and grab hold of systemic inequalities that continually plague for-hire transportation (whatever its form!), rendering them visible again before public attention is redirected and these issues again slide beneath the screen of political and material automation.