There’s a good reason you feel queasy sitting in an autonomous vehicle.
Your Back Page scribbler will happily admit he feels a bit unnerved when he views footage of self-driving cars whizzing around the streets of San Francisco.
The bride of multiple decades, a long-time sufferer of motion sickness, is even more dramatically impacted, saying she feels waves of nausea just looking at the cars in action and vowing never to set foot in one of those infernal devices.
It seems we are not alone in our misgivings over the wonders of Waymo and the like.
According to findings published this week in a book by a professor of engineering psychology, our human brains are simply not designed to feel comfortable with the role played by these new vehicles.
The book, by Ronald McLeod titled Transitioning to Autonomy, examines decades of research into how humans interact with automated systems.
In a nutshell, the book comes to the perhaps counterintuitive conclusion that sitting in the driver’s seat of a self-driving car may be more taxing on our grey matter than actually driving a traditional vehicle.
Why might that be?
The answer lies in the change of role required of the passenger once a self-driving car’s autonomous features are switch on.
Instead of relaxing back and letting the car do all the work, the passenger in fact must become the “supervisory controllers” monitoring the system’s ongoing performance and standing ready to intervene at a moment’s notice.
According to Professor McLeod, this creates what psychologists call a “vigilance task” of maintaining attention during periods of low activity – something humans are notoriously bad at.
“We’re not capable of consciously paying continuous attention for more than relatively short periods,” Professor McLeod said in a media release. “Yet that’s exactly what these systems expect of us.”
Recalling his own personal experience of his first time in charge of a self-driving car, Professor McLeod said the experience was very stressful.
“I was handed the keys with no training whatsoever and let loose into Glasgow rush-hour traffic,” he said. “No research ethics committee would ever allow such an experiment, yet this is happening to drivers every day around the world.”
Professor McLeod described the unsettling experience of approaching slow-moving traffic while his car maintained speed.
“I could see the hazard ahead but had no way of knowing if the vehicle was aware of it,” he said. “That uncertainty creates anxiety – how long should I wait before taking control?”
But rather than abandoning the self-driving concept altogether, Professor McLeod says the stress issues could be addressed by more intelligent interface design that would communicate the system’s “awareness” to drivers rather than leave them guessing.
We would agree with that in principle, but imagine if your self-driving, constantly talking car was programmed by a sarcastic young engineer and spoke to you like this?
“Yes, I can see those pedestrians up ahead. I’m not going to run them over so you can calm down … or am I? Heh heh heh …”
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