IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 48

contemporary example is the creation of the crime of
"theft of time," "defined as the misuse of an employer's
time and property by an employee," an offense punishable by dismissal from employment [16], [31], [32]. A
contemporary study of trucking finds a strong cost
motive for the use of GPS technology for surveillance
and monitoring, as well as a tool to control and discipline driver behavior [32]. Consequently, SDV technology may give rise to new forms of social control and
discipline by enabling knowledge of our practices.

Why the SDV Vision Should Not Remain Narrow
We argue that the current vision of SDV technological
development cannot retain its narrow perspective. It
neglects to take account of the fact that technology
embodies social relations and political meanings [28],
and has the potential to shape society, infrastructure,
practice, and ideology. Technology may be useful for
certain purposes and, at the same time, carry serious
consequences such as loss of privacy, alterations in
social relations, degradation of skills, and environmental devastation [33]. Ultimately, technology is a profoundly social phenomenon, with both intended and
unintended consequences for our everyday lives [23],
[34]-[37], and the potential to shape society, infrastructure, practice, and ideology.
By aiming primarily to solve the problems of the previous technology, i.e., the automobile, the current vision
of SDV technology falls short in two important aspects.
First, it neglects a range of societal dimensions of technology. It fails to recognize interdependencies between
societal dimensions. It does not account for the broader
picture of why and how society uses technology in the
first place, and how technology continues to influence
and shape societal structures and relations. Second, the
current approach to SDV development is deterministic,
assuming that the specific future it imagines is "inevitable." The current design approach thus does not allow
for the development and evaluation of alternative futures
that might be based on broad, democratic public discussions with multiple stakeholders. Consequently, a
single potential future becomes the one that is decided
and inevitable, and we must move toward it.
Ultimately, the development of SDV technology is a
question of social justice, and should be assessed in
nuanced, pluralistic ways according to the manner in
which it carries out distribution of benefits and burdens
across current and future societies. It is exactly this preeminence given to a single positive and unproblematic
future that has led to systematic sidestepping of important ethical and social challenges. As technology designers and implementers, we have a responsibility to
design for the future for all people in an equitable way.
SDV development is, then, an activity of moral choice,

laden with an imperative to imagine a range of desired
alternative futures. We need to make normative choices
about which future we will aspire to, and the future cannot be based on profit alone.

How Can We Expand the SDV Design Vision?
If design practice is to account for this wider and futureoriented perspective, there is a need for a significant paradigm shift and evolution of design practices. If we
consider only narrowly-conceived notions of the usability
and usefulness of technology, there is a danger of
neglecting the complexity of broader sociotechnical systems and the interdependencies between technical and
social justice considerations. A starting point for such a
paradigm shift is to study what people are doing with
technical systems and why. Such an approach would
require expanding the focus on SDVs as primarily technical objects, and taking account of the broader sociotechnical systems in which they are embedded, including
multiple stakeholders, impacts on infrastructure and
environment, and distribution of benefits and burdens.
Design should be seen as "inventing the future," by
imagining a range of possible and desired futures, while
considering a range of values [38]. It is important to take
seriously the cultural-historical imperative and to understand design influences as flowing from global technocapitalism and socio-technical change [38].
An immediate challenge arises when designers are
faced with accommodating conflicting values such as a
traffic control mechanism for SDVs that balances questions of safety, privacy, mobility, and environmental sustainability. A framework for the ethical design of SDVs
must consider a range of implications of technology automation and the future. These include greater degrees of
embeddedness and interconnectivity that generate social
and political complexities, issues of privacy and responsibility, and changes in cultural values. The first step in
dealing with this complexity in technology design would
be accepting that complexity exists. By looking away or
shrugging at this complexity, engineers and designers are
losing a critical opportunity to better understand the distribution of benefits and burdens that SDV technology will
have on current and future generations.

Shaping the Future
A complexity- and foresight-based approach enables a
perspective in which the future is something that can be
shaped; it is neither "already decided" nor "inevitable." A
sociotechnical design framework should account for the
changing role of the human inside and outside the vehicle
as well as consequent impacts on sociotechnical structures and practices. For example, how would the SDV
reconfigure practices of driving and mobility planning for
different users, different trip purposes, and different daily

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

∕

september 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016