Better cars or better humans

Blog post written by Xénia Weulersse and edited by Duina Jørgensen

Today the current socio-technical regime believes that the future of our world lies in the development of new technologies, well at least this is what Jeff and his collaborators believes. Jeff Schneider- is the speaker of a Ted talk called “How Self-Driving Cars Will Transform Our Cities and Our Lives” presented in 2017. He argues that self-driving cars are the solution for a safer and better future, especially in cities. However, does self-driving cars ensure us a safer future in terms of mobility? Does he depicts a future we as citizens would like to live?

 Will technology save us? 

A thought-provoking TED-talk called “How Self-Driving Cars Will Transform Our Cities and Lives” (Schneider, 2017) argues that car accidents are the top third causes of human death on our planet. He claims that the root causes are mainly due to the recognition and decision errors of human drivers, as they are being immersed in a multitude of information, especially while driving in the city. In his talk Jeff mentions, I quote: “the only way we are really going to make progress is if we figure out how to have that car drive itself” (Schneider, 2017). We can agree that from a technological perspective, having self-driving cars is progress. But we can question if technology is a progress for the well-being of humans and thinking in a bigger picture, our planet. Are self-driving cars the solution for saving our lives? What about the amount of deaths caused by car toxic pollution? Human deaths caused by car accidents are certainly easier to record than deaths caused by emissions of motorized vehicles. For the reason that death caused by pollution is hard to identify and accumulate empirical evidence over longer periods of time which results in increasing the likelihood of those deaths. Contrastingly, car crashes are tangible materializations with an instant effect, which can more easily be counted. If we could take in consideration deaths caused by car emissions, we might have more deaths caused by cars than what Jeff presents in is talk. 

Furthermore, by enabling self-driving cars in cities, what kind of habits and patterns is Jeff supporting? He implies that car is the solution. This means that our habits of driving in the city isn’t seen as the issue but that supporting the development of the problem lies in the accidents caused by the driver. This means that in his discourse Jeff doesn’t question the current socio-technical system set in place by supporting the car regime. By advertising for self-driving-cars he is in fact reinforcing and supporting the use of cars in cities. Which implies that he legitimates the prioritization of cars instead of other transportation types in cities. However, cars are designed to transport drivers and passages from a point A to a point B without physical effort. This implies that Jeff support the idea that cars – a transportation technology that require no physical effort- is necessary in cities. In other words, by peaching in favors of self-driving cars he also implicitly argues that cars should stay the normative transport in cities. By deduction he maintains the idea that effortless physical mobility such as cars in cities is the solution for our future.

Do you agree with those thoughts? Do you agree with a vision of car-crowded cities, impeding the luxury of fresh air and a healthy active lifestyle? The future is whatever we depict and work towards. Fortunately, there are alternative futures and ways to get there. keep reading…

Towards a humane transition 

Jeff’s TED talk presented us an undeniably complex and fascinating technology, however through his talk he isn’t offering us a future that accentuates traits of a sustainable transition. Self-driving car is an innovation that follows the instilled technological trajectories. This paradigm embodies the believe that solutions lies in technology. Those widely spread thoughts constitute our current socio-technical regime until now (Geels, 2002). But initiating a sustainable transition goes beyond just research and development of new technologies. A sustainable transition aims at achieving a radical change of regime, which includes the transformation of multiple aspects of our socio-technical regime. 

We consider that a technical innovation as he proposes is not ambitious enough. He has a restricted way to look at a change. In order to think about a pragmatic future, we can’t only discuss technology, we also need to discuss all the other socio-technical aspects that it will affect. As Geel’s support on the Multi-Level Perspective theory (MLP), for a regime transition to occur, not only technology has to be taken is consideration but we also need to reconsider the broad perspective. In this broad perspective, multiple other factors play important roles, such as the change of consumer behaviors, value, culture, meaning and industrial infrastructures, etc. (Geel, 2002). Those aspects need to be taken in account to create an alternative and pragmatic vision of tomorrow’s regime. 

Furthermore, we believe that in order to save lives we need to rethink the system and propose a sustainable transition that goes beyond self-driving cars. Today 2 Planetary Boundaries (PB), Biogeochemical flows and Biosphere integrity are being overpassed. Additionally, 2 other PBs such as Land Use Change and Climate Change are reaching their limits. Those 2 last boundaries are showing, until a certain extend, the usage of motorized vehicles. Especially the Climate Change PB which include the level of CO₂ emissions emitted by cars. The concept of PBs relies on scientific measurement that allow us to visualize the planet’s resilience tipping points (Rockström, 2015). Without resilience there isn’t stable ecosystems and life on earth will suffer from destructive overconsumption of its resources. Therefore, it is important to shape sustainable transition visions, to enable the implemented of innovations that belong to a prosperous future which respect the PBs. Nevertheless, Jeff doesn’t mention any technology shift that enable cars to pollute less, we can thus consider that those self-driving cars might contribute to the degradation of our ecosystems. Besides, sustainability also lies in the way innovations are qualified and car pollution is today left out as a negative externality (Callon, 1998). This means that cars or self-driving cars pollution emitted do not count as a tangible problem for the economy. Those externalities may have a negative impact on our health (Sattar et al., 2016) but remain market overflows that allow Jeff to promote self-driving cars without questioning the negative impact they might have on us and the PBs.

Meanwhile, his solution is still at a local experimental level. Let’s look at self-driving-cars as if it was at a niche scale, to use Schot and Geels vocabulary – which is in itself an assumption that can be discussed. Throughout Schneider’s TED-talk he communicates to the world that a new technology is coming. This way, he implants seeds in people’s head to facilitate self-driving cars to break-in the market and the socio-technical regime in place (Schot and Geels, 2008.). But Geels and Schot theory should be applied to innovation that change or will change our current regime and affect our habits and lives. Is it the case with self-driving cars? Furthermore, on one hand we all know that cities are polluted and that the pollution emitted by vehicles is increasing. That cars in cities take up a lot of valuable spaces as he himself agues. What if we wouldn’t for once put technologies in the center of our preoccupation, but would put our health instead? By doing so, we would prioritize our well-being and hopefully the well-being of the environment around us. What if instead of commuting by car and going to the gym in the evening, we could use our bodies to transport ourselves to work?

Healthier humans

Cars have multiple negative impacts on human health and therefore affect people’s life expectancy as well as their life’s quality. Besides affecting our health with its pollution, cars can also have a negative effect on our weight. Studies show that we have around between 20% and 30% more changes to be obese if we commute by car on everyday bases (Ding, 2014). What if sport and healthy lifestyles were the new vision for a sustainable transition? Instead of focusing our energy on maintaining the current socio-technical regime and invest time and money on self-driving cars, we could shift and use the energy of our bodies to commute. In a near future, Copenhagen could see cars being removed from the urban environment and deploy its resources for the development of sports and well-being in the city’s streets. In order to decrease the risk of become obese, we could encourage Copenhagen citizens to use different sports to get around the city. Even if biking is already a well-established mode of transport in the city and that a large fraction of the population bikes to work cars remain prioritized, especially on the main boulevards. By experience, large numbers of people commuting by bike are constraint to share narrow bike paths build on the side of those avenues. Therefore, we propose that streets become prioritized for all different sports that allow us to move with the energy of our body. For example, large bike paths could replace car roads. Electrical bikes and other non-motorized transport innovations would be subsidized. Bike paths could become running lines with a ground adapted to it. The idea would be to encourage people to enjoy their commuting journey instead of rushing to work. Besides, the city would be reorganized to strengthen social relationships and the local economy in neighborhoods. This could be done by engaging a collaboration with relevant stakeholders to co-design the layout of such neighborhoods. A sustainable transition guideline would be followed. Activities such as workshops, prototyping sessions and creating future scenarios would be organized (Gaziulusoy and Ryan, 2017). By enabling such a transition car pollution in cities would be drastically reduced or even abolished and the clean air would allow citizens to practice sports in healthy conditions. 

Focusing on our health and making us better humans would mean that this regime would be made for us. It would be there to take care of us as humans being. For most of us, every day we go to work and hope to contribute to a better world. But if we don’t enjoy our work and life, for who are we making a better world? 

Better cars or Healthier Humans? 

Throughout the deconstruction of Jeff TED-talk and the introduction of a new storyline, we have shown you 2 different visions of what the future might have to offer. On one hand, there is Jeff story that refers to the current socio-technical regime narrative which believes that technology will save us. He argues that self-driving-car is the solution since humans won’t have to drive and thus cause less car accidents. On the other hand, we discussed the urgency there is in shifting towards a sustainable transition in order to stay alive and healthy as human beings. We believe that in order to reduce or eliminate the death caused by car we would focus our energy on improving cars but rather implementing a sustainable transition aiming to rethink the city’s mobility. As we argued car pollution might cause more death that the data shows, but also that the usage of car increase by approximately 30% your chance of becoming obese. Those main arguments show that those death caused by cars in cities might need to be solve by looking at a broader picture then only the implementation of a new technology. We want a sustainable transition!

So after reading this article, how would you like to imagine your future life? Do you still agree with Jeff paradigm and have the intention of buying a self-driving car or follow us in a sustainable transition based on protecting our health and respecting the Planetary Boundaries?

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References:

Callon, M., 1998. An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology. The Sociological Review, 46(1_suppl), pp.244-269.

Ding, D., Gebel, K., Phongsavan, P., Bauman, A. and Merom, D. (2014). Driving: A Road to Unhealthy Lifestyles and Poor Health Outcomes. [online] Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4049576/ [Accessed 13 Feb. 2020].

Downeyobesityreport.com. (2020). European Union » The Downey Obesity Report. [online] Available at: http://www.downeyobesityreport.com/tag/european-union/[Accessed 13 Feb. 2020].

Gaillard, R., 2016. Rémi GAILLARD OLYMPICS. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8HyNa6hjY&gt; [Accessed 24 March 2020].

Gaziulusoy, A.İ. and Ryan, C., 2017. Shifting conversations for sustainability transitions using participatory design visioning. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), pp.S1916-S1926.

Geels, F.W., 2002. Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study. Research policy, 31(8-9), pp.1257-1274.

Rockström, J., 2015. Bounding the planetary future: Why we need a great transition. Great Transition Initiative, 9, p.5

Sattar, et al., 2016. Airborne Infectious Agents And Other Pollutants In Automobiles For Domestic Use: Potential Health Impacts And Approaches To Risk Mitigation. [online] Journal of Environmental and Public Health. Available at: <https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2016/1548326/&gt; [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Schneider, J. (2017). [online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHV4AiCvSmw [Accessed 28 Feb. 2020].

Schot, J. and Geels, F.W., 2008. Strategic niche management and sustainable innovation journeys: theory, findings, research agenda, and policy. Technology analysis & strategic management, 20(5), pp.537-554.

Virtuos. 2018. Virtuos Contribues To Transformers: Age Of Extinction. [online] Available at: <https://www.virtuosgames.com/ko/virtuos-contribues-transformers-age-extinction&gt; [Accessed 26 March 2020].