Selling AI: The Case of Fully Autonomous Vehicles

In the past several years, an array of technologists, economists, and technology pundits have predicted that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are poised to revolutionize our lives, changing how we work, play, travel, shop, create, and more. The ensuing popular discourse often construes AI as the inevitable result of technological progress, against which we have no claim to stand. Promoters from multiple domains converge to inform us that AI is a socioeconomic boon, a superior alternative that can liberate human labor by replacing it with cheaper and more efficient computation. In other cases, promoters recast AI in more transformational terms as an innovative means to accomplish tasks beyond prior reach or as the only available or feasible solution for an intractable social problem. It is in this last instance that most promoters argue for the adoption of fully autonomous vehicles. In short, fully autonomous vehicles have a range of favorable and unfavorable potential outcomes for individuals and society, some of which futurists have begun to envision and others of which they have not.