Autonomous cars and agency: An empirical study on the coexistence of artificial drivers and humans in traffic

Abstract: As autonomous cars are introduced in the social environment of traffic it is uncertain how they will enact agency. Prior research has focused on solely technical aspects, overlooking the social. The aim was thus to investigate how agency is attributed to autonomous cars in traffic. Using an interpretative qualitative research approach, we explored how eight stakeholders from various domains attributed agency to autonomous cars. This was accomplished by having them solve scenarios that highlights agential issues with autonomous cars‐human interaction. The results showed that most endeavors of introducing autonomous cars involved adapting the environment to the technology, something that is problematic both in theory and practice. Some respondents from academia attributed human‐like agency to autonomous cars as they with programmed aggressive behaviour were to actively cooperate with humans. Nevertheless, this view proved to be in minority as practitioners and respondents from public sector attributed the pre existing Information Systems (IS) definition of agency where technology acts passively under human control. This was also reflected by technology in use as well as rules that govern how autonomous cars operate in the real world, prompting us to favor the IS definition. However, the autonomous cars were at times not under direct human control since they under highly constricted conditions operated autonomously, making the IS definition somewhat inadequate. Consequently, we coined a new definition called “limited autonomous agency” that more adequately reflects how autonomous cars operates autonomously while being in arm’s reach of humans.