hello and welcome to speaking of psychology a podcast produced by the
American Psychological Association I'm your host Kim Mills and I'm speaking
to you from a piays technology mind and society conference in Washington this is
an interdisciplinary meeting aimed at assessing current efforts to understand
and shape the interactions of human beings and technology for identifying
priorities for future work and for promoting exchange of ideas and
collaboration among participants David Friedman is the director of cars and
product policy and analysis for consumers Union the policy arm of
Consumer Reports that focuses on product testing and consumer safety mr. Friedman
serves as a thought leader across Consumer Reports and leads consumers
unions public policy and analytical efforts to ensure automobiles and other
products are safe for consumers to improve consumer options for energy
efficiency and cleaner energy and to guide other important initiatives an
engineer he previously served as both deputy and Acting Administrator of the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and was deputy assistant
secretary for the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the
US Department of Energy mr. Friedman also worked for 12 years at the Union of
Concerned Scientists as senior engineer research director and deputy director of
their clean vehicles program thanks for joining us today thank you so I'd like
to start by talking about self-driving cars and my first question is whether
consumers Union has a position on the need for and feasibility of self-driving
cars at this point well we're really excited about the potential for cars
that can drive themselves I mean just think of a world where it doesn't matter
whether you have a disability what your age is or what your driving capability
is you can have mobility and access all over your city or town plus if you
combine those self-driving cars with electric cars and car sharing we could
dramatically lower cost for consumers while increasing mobility and lowering
emissions so the potential is amazing but that word potential is important the
reality is the technology of self-driving cars in many ways is at
best equivalent to a novice driver or a teen driver there's a lot of work that
still needs to be done so are we ready psychologically for self-driving cars I
think that is a fantastic and really critical question because when I look at
self-driving cars one of the things that I think is important is to make sure we
have we design automation for humans instead of trying to design humans for
automation because we will fail at that latter task human-centered automation is
going to be the key to success here and that means understanding more about how
people are going to interact with this technology what are what are the pros
and cons of self-driving cars I mean I think it cuts both ways well when I
think of self-driving cars I kind of think about we have two possible futures
with this technology in one future we have a utopia where we have better
mobility we effectively eliminate traffic crashes we cut costs and have a
great convenience feature for consumers so they can get wherever they want to go
whenever they want to go that's the utopia situation the
dystopian world is where we have self-driving cars that aren't safe put
people at risk that increase the amount we travel and increase the emissions we
create and create a world where we're all basically locked into our cars
instead of spending time with our family and friends you mentioned the
possibility of fewer accidents and of course there's been a lot of publicity
around the accident that just happened in Arizona where the uber hit a cyclist
what what went wrong there I mean why didn't the car know that the cyclist was
there well you know there's several investigations going on
so I always want to be careful not to prejudge we have two federal agencies
that are going to dive in and try to understand the details what I've
observed from the video associated with it is a couple of things one it looks
like the system wasn't capable of stopping in time in in approaching a
pedestrian in the dark that's shocking I mean when we think of self-driving cars
we think of a car that's going to be safer than a human driver so that's one
thing it looks like the technology wasn't up to task the second thing is
they had a human in the in the driver's seat who was supposed to be there to
take over in case of an emergency but the human was distracted and what that
tells me is something I think we all already know humans aren't very good at
watching paint dry I mean that's the job of these folks is to try to pay close
attention to everything that's going on around them in a car that's supposed to
be able to drive itself that is a very difficult task these cars should have
driver monitoring systems to make sure that safety driver is actually paying
attention I would say the biggest thing that went wrong here though is
fundamental human error in the design testing and rush to market of these
self-driving cars and yet we've been talking about self-driving cars for
something like 50 years right so how are we rushing to market so if you think
about automation in cars we've actually been increasingly automating cars for
over a hundred years actually I mean originally you had to walk up to a car
and literally crank the engine to get it started and then we created starter
motors so from starter motors to self-driving cars we've had basically an
evolution of automation in our cars but what's different now is that the
computing power and sensors available to car companies and tech companies is
lightyears ahead of where we've been and they're now trying to figure out how to
apply that to cars so why does that mean we're rushing
things now well the problem is there's so much money to be made from a world of
self-driving cars that companies appear to be rushing to test these vehicles on
our roads and sell these vehicles on our roads before they have demonstrated and
proven that they're actually safe to be on our roads so what do you think
ultimately is the role of the human being inside a self-driving car well I
think really the the big question is both what is the role of a human inside
this health driving car but also what is the role of the human being in the
design manufacture and approach and governance of self-driving cars I mean
hopefully in the long term we'll get to a world where cars are truly smart
enough and capable of driving themselves but we're only going to get there if we
recognize that self-driving cars do not eliminate human error all they do is
shift the propensity and the the likelihood of human error from the
driver where it is today to the people designing the vehicles to the managers
approving those designs and to the corporate executives who are
establishing the culture of that company are you going to make the error of
putting profit over safety or are you going to make the choice to put safety
over profits when it comes to self-driving cars and that's so many
people try to say self-driving cars will eliminate human error that's not the
case unless our robot robot overlords take over humans will always be in the
loop so here's a conundrum a self-driving car that has to make a
decision let's say that there are pedestrians in a crosswalk and the car
can either hit the pedestrians or it can pull into oncoming traffic so it has to
decide effectively between whether you kill or maim pedestrians or kill or maim
the people inside the car how does it choose well I mean this is the classic
trolley car problem that has been an ethical question for as long probably as
people have been thinking about this and let me answer it two ways the first
answer is we have no idea why because there are no standards or requirements
or policies for ethics when it comes to self-driving cars and in fact at one
point the agency involved with overseeing auto safety the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration put out guidelines saying that car
companies should be transparent about how they're going to approach these
issues well in the most recent administration they eliminated ethics
from the guidelines so I'm very concerned that we don't know when we're
not gonna know for a long time how the car is going to make that
decision what should happen is the cars should be designed to never get in that
situation in the first place it's kind of like you know the Captain Kirk
Kobayashi Maru approach you know when given a difficult test change the rules
of the test and that's what self-driving cars need to do is we need to design
them so that they're safe enough that they can avoid those tough situations
and then if they are in those tough situations yes ultimately there needs to
be some public agreement as to what moral and ethical standards are we going
to apply to the design of those vehicles and that gets back to my earlier point
humans are always going to be in the loop when it comes to self-driving cars
so what do you see as the role of psychologists in the development of
self-driving cars to me there's so many possible critical places that I can see
bringing psychology in to the development of self-driving cars I think
first of all it is understanding human error and helping people figure out
where does human error come from and how you can minimize it because as I said
yes maybe you're ultimately you'll get the human driver out of the loop you'll
still have human error throughout the design and decision making process so
how do you how can psychologists help understand and corporate culture and and
designer culture and software coder culture such that you can influence that
culture help us change that culture to ensure that the proper steps are in
place so that safety comes first I think another critical role is
realizing that there is also humans are going to be in the loop when it comes to
pedestrians and cyclists even if tomorrow every new car was a
self-driving car you'll still have people on the roads um who are walking
or biking and even if every new car on the road was a self-driving car next
year you still have a legacy fleet of human drivers of human driven cars that
are going to be on the road for 10 to 15 years so how do you deal with that mixed
use situation is really critical another key role is how do you do human
centered automation how do you ensure that a car that has no driver can talk
to a pedestrian or other cars how do people think how do people
perceive that technology and what kind of communication from that technology
around its intents can help save lives so the car can't just scream hey stupid
get out of the way exactly or just think of if you're a pedestrian walking across
the road walking across a crosswalk what do you try to do I try to lock eyes with
the driver of those cars so that a base I know they see me and I humanize myself
as someone who shouldn't be run into it exactly and if they don't look at me
then I'm nervous and maybe I won't cross well what if there's no human in there
how do I know that car is paying attention to me so this whole concept of
human centered automation both the design of the automation for the people
inside the car and the design of the automation for the people outside of the
car I think is a rich and critical area for the world of psychology to get
better engaged last but not least it's understanding how humans deal with risk
think about it this way how many fatalities in the United States do we
tolerate when it comes to commercial airliners the answer is zero
how many fatalities do we tolerate every single year when it comes to our cars a
lot around 40,000 in fact in in 2016 it was 37,000 461 lives lost it was a
record year a 14 percent increase over two previous years and yet we tolerate
that why is it because we tolerate our own error we can see ourselves in the
drivers who are driving drunk who aren't wearing seatbelts who are making all
these critical errors but we can't see ourselves in the pilot or the company
responsible for the plane or is it a question of control if I'm in control I
know I'm safe I mean I'm a safe driver all of you are unsafe but I am a safe
driver that's that is a very classic attitude and it comes with some risks
but if someone else is in control how does that alter our perception these are
critical things we need to better understand not so that we can manage
people around the safety of these vehicles but so that we can manage the
safety of these vehicles around people so some of what you just said raises in
my mind the question of legal liability so who is liable is it the car and the
engineering or is it the person who's sitting there ostensibly doing little to
nothing well and this brings up a couple of things first of all I think in a
world where the car truly drives itself and there's no human driver other than
setting the destination I think it should should be pretty clear it's the
company who designed and operates the vehicle but the world we're in right now
there are none of these true self-driving cars for sale today the
only cars we have are cars that can drive can take over some of the driving
functions but not all of them and in 2016 we had a case where someone was
driving a a Tesla vehicle with its autopilot system they ignored the
warnings over and over that they needed to be having their hands on the wheel
they ended up plowing into the side an 18-wheeler because the car couldn't
see it I mean imagine that the car couldn't see
an 18-wheeler going broadside in front of it and so plowed right into it I
would say there's double fault there and in fact the the National Transportation
Safety Board that's exactly what they said they said one the driver bore fault
because they ignored the warnings but also the company bore fault because it
was allowing this car to operate in a situation it couldn't handle it allowed
the car to keep cruising down the road even though the driver was ignoring it
it allowed the car to operate on a road where you could have an 18-wheeler
crossing in front of it so until cars can truly drive themselves
both the human and the humans behind the car are going to be responsible when
these cars hurt and kill people any other aspects of self-driving cars that
we haven't touched on that you want to talk to people about um well I would say
one thing that that's I think critical for folks to think about is what is the
role of government within all of this and the challenge we have right now is a
lot of the effort is actually to get government out of the way so you have
Congress is working on a bill that would allow hundreds of thousands if not
millions of self-driving cars to be sold or commercially used on our roads that
could be exempt from critical safety standards
you have an administration that is making clear that all guidance on
self-driving cars is voluntary this lays a fair attitude I fear is going to end
up delaying the technology the the excuse that folks give is it's about
accelerating the technology but as we start to see fatalities from
self-driving cars I think that poses a huge risk for consumer backlash and if
consumers think that these technology is unsafe it's going to delay that
technology by years or even decades which means it's going to delay the
potential to save lives by years or even decades so that's one of my biggest
concerns right now is there are no protections in place and we need in the
current situation we have where government isn't stepping up
we need companies to step up and put safety first to share data making clear
how safe their vehicles are to not allow their vehicles to be operated outside of
situations where they're safe and to stop working to undermine existing
consumer protections in Washington well thank you very much David Friedman for
joining us today it's been very interesting thank you I appreciate it
speaking of psychology is part of the APA podcast network which includes other
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I'm Kim Mills with the American Psychological Association and this is
speaking of psychology
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