Paper short abstract:

This presentation shares early reflections on a collaborative project combining both cognitive science and philosophy approaches with theater and immersive experience design to yield new insights into how humans and AI systems relate in the context of a self-driving car.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation we reflect on our collaborative project combining cognitive science and philosophy approaches with theater and immersive experience design to yield new insights into how humans and AI systems relate. The context for our project is the near-term future of self-driving vehicles, and the complexity this change will bring in large-scale system shifts in infrastructure and industry, and changes in the way humans and cars will relate. As cars transform, new paradigms will be needed for understanding how human and vehicle interact. Specifically, we set aside notions of human-technology interaction as rigid input/output relationships. Instead, we co-explore a future where vehicle and mobility systems are one of many adaptive elements in the soft-assembled potentiality of future human-technology systems (Kelso, 1995).

Inspired by research on life after the car (Dennis & Urry 2009), the sociology of car cultures and mobilities (Miller 2001, Grieco & Urry 2011) and Parvin and Pollock’s research (2020) into the rhetoric of the unintended consequence, we draw out possible future perspectives on our actions today, through imaginative, participatory simulation. Participation in our VR car simulator invites visitors to contribute their own memories of the car as vehicle for identity, culture, and freedom, offering a potential future strategy for memorializing the car. These stories are used to generate AI text, creatively voiced by a human improv actor portraying the car AI, to enact a speculative future of how humans and AI systems (including in vehicles) will relate to one another, through the frame of shared experience.