A few days ago, I stumbled upon an article with this headline:
Self-driving bus crashes two hours after launch in Las Vegas.We don't know all the details right now (the police report is coming out later this week), but essentially there was a driverless bus that began operating in Las Vegas last weekend. A few hours after its debut, a truck backed into the bus, causing "minor damage."
The bus was touted as the United States' first self-driving shuttle project for the public before it hit a semi-truck.
Now, imagine scrolling through your feed and seeing an article titled "Driver bumps into another car, causing minor dent." It seems absurd, but here, since a self-driving vehicle was involved, this incident suddenly makes appearances all over the national news. And it wasn't even the self-driving bus' fault.
This type of coverage inevitably hinders the advancement of autonomous vehicles. In psychology, we learned about the availability heuristic, which influences people's decisions based on how readily examples come to mind. People aren't going to feel safe driving autonomous vehicles when their impressions are based on (misleading) reports of such "crashes."
And again, when was the last time you saw an article titled "Self-driving shuttle bus doesn't crash on its first day in service"? It's not just this incident, but I think that there is a disproportionate amount of coverage that casts a negative light on self-driving cars, painting a picture that is far from reality: "Self-driving technology has been involved in crashes before, but almost all reported incidents have been due to human error," according to the BBC article.
We can't say that self-driving cars are dangerous because they get into accidents. Normal cars crash too. But for some reason, the self-driving ones get all the bad rep.
What do you guys think?
Related Articles
Reporting 1
Reporting 2
More Accurate Coverage
Analysis 1
Analysis 2
"Truck driver bumps into bus." Boring.
"Truck driver bumps into self-driving bus." Omg really!?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
9 comments:
I think you bring up a really good point. I like how you related this to psychology and also just how people are going to go to a headline that interests them most. Self driving cars are going to be pretty important in the foreseeable future, and casting them in a negative light like this doesn't seem like a great idea. The fact that reporters are writing such articles based on minor research and thought about the subject also is a bit concerning.
I also believe this may have some repercussions outside of technology. As we learned in class, reporters generally are trying to get more viewers, and their coverage of "interesting" things rather than important content sometimes is concerning. I think the media needs to get away from that attitude in general to keep our public more informed.
I think that the negative coverage makes sense because people must trust their life to an automated vehicle, and have no control over what the vehicle does unless there is a human driver in the seat. I believe that the goal of these vehicles is to be functional without a human backup driver, so I can understand why people may not want to ride in one of these because it may not be able to handle other driver’s mistakes or situations like lane switching. Obviously, once these vehicles could potentially make the road a lot safer because people won’t need to worry about tired or drunk drivers if every car drives by itself, but how can these cars anticipate what another car will do? Blinkers are useless if you don’t have eyes to see it, which makes the most dangerous part of driving even more complicated.
Adding on to what Kamal said, the media is going to spin events in order to attract the most viewers. With this competition to sell the most stories, different media sites try to report stories in the most interesting way, often shaping people's opinions as well. Framed article titles that encourage the assumption that the crash occurred because of the self-driving bus seem more interesting than articles that depict an accident that just happened to involve a self-driving bus. But I don't believe the media is purposely portraying self-driving cars in a bad light; that's what gets the most attention. In trying to get views, the media accidentally perpetuates people's negative opinions and doubts about these self-driving cars.
In this situation, a human was technically at fault. The driver of the truck decided to back up into an alleyway and ended up hitting the front of the stopped bus. So technically it's the truck driver's fault, but the bus could've prevented it. One of the key differences between humans and machines is that humans have a higher recognition of intent. We can predict what will happen in certain situations and act accordingly. Unfortunately, autonomy is a relatively new technology, and this bus incident brings to light an important engineering mistake. The bus was engineered to recognize a stopped vehicle, but has no idea what to do when the vehicle starts reversing. Maybe program it to honk?
In my opinion, autonomous cars have great potential, but are shot down by the media and skeptics. As explained by the other comments, the media portrays them as self-crashing deathboxes on wheels whenever they get the chance to, which in a way could be true. Until the engineers program these cars properly, they are potentially dangerous to the public.
I agree wholeheartedly that this article is misleading. Just like how we learned about agenda setting and how the media can influence the importance people place upon issues of public concern, I believe that this article intentionally casts self-driving cars as dangerous and perhaps some of the writers are even affiliated with large automobile companies that don't produce self-driving cars. And just like how the media can blow up petty details about a politician's personal life because it attracts the most attention from the public (love affairs, for instance),this article is popular no doubt because it goes against the common belief that self-driving cars are cool and innovative.
I agree with your point of view especially because I have never thought about the advancement of self driving vehicles this way. It is obviously something that will be heavily used in our every day lives in the future, and it should not be misrepresented for the mistakes they are not making. I think that society needs to accept the technology advancements, because it is something that can not be stopped or put on hold. Although it can be/seem more dangerous without a person driving, false headlines should not be written to ruin their credibility.
I think it is understandable that self driving vehicles get the amount of attention as they do when they are involved in an accident even though it wasn't their fault, people are skeptical towards self driving vehicles since they are a work in progress. Furthermore, it is also understandable that the headlines are written they way they are since the journalists are trying to get people to read their article which is why they write stories like these is order to maximize the amount of readers, the journalists have to exaggerate to some degree in order to hook the readers.
I agree with you in that the media influences the way we perceive self driving vehicles; the media gives it a bad reputation and makes it seem more dangerous than an actual car, which could be incorrect. Journalists purposefully make it seem worse than it actually is in order to intrigue and gain the attention of the public. People need to be more aware of what they are reading and recognize its biases.
I think that self-driving cars receive a bad reputation mostly because they’re new and some people don’t like new since they are unfamiliar with the new technology. Also, the media can further the dislike of new technology of the public. Adding on to the availability bias, the individuals could also have confirmation bias where they pay attention to certain information from news outlets that confirms their previous beliefs of negativity towards self-driving cars. Additionally, individuals who are not in favor of these cars could ignore contradictory information such as the statistics of successful drives by self-driving cars. The difference between "Truck driver bumps into bus" and "Truck driver bumps into self-driving bus” is in the mention of the new technology. Like consumers, the population’s interest is piqued when an unfamiliar and new invention is displayed in media. “Self-driving cars” is a much more interesting topic than an everyday occurence of a minor car accident.
Post a Comment