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Future Automated Mobilities: Towards hope, justice, and care
Author Kathy Nickels
Date 22 August 2022
Transport systems and vehicles are rapidly becoming automated, often in ways invisible to us. Cars have increasingly automated features like auto brake, cruise control and auto parking. Ride sharing, and car or bike sharing services which are managed through automated digital platforms are increasingly popular. We plan and navigate our routes using data driven recommendations delivered by smartphone apps or in-car systems.
It is predicted that in the near future fully self-driving cars will be on the roads, flying cars and drones will be in the skies, and that we will be using automated mobility systems (such as Mobility as a Service) that will create seamless travel experiences for us by connecting different modes of transport in one journey.
But how are the automated technologies behind these systems being developed? How are the future people who will be using these systems being envisioned? And what kinds of participation are needed to ensure trusted and safe futures for all?
Join discussions on these questions and more at the Future Automated Mobilities: Towards Hope, Justice, and Care symposium being hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) 20 – 21 October 2022.
Attendees can join in-person at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia or online. All activities are free, to secure your spot visit the event registration page.
Key issues to be discussed at this event:
- Why do we need to be careful? Where are the limitations, flaws and inequities, in dominant anticipatory visions and narratives? What could possibly go wrong if we place ADM at the centre of a predictive, automated and data-driven mobilities future?
- How might we anticipate trusted mobilities futures based in principles of care? And what could go right if we do? What might more realistic, ethical and responsible automated mobilities futures might look like? What does safety actually entail when we explore it from the perspective of the diverse groups of people who might encounter ADM in transport mobilities?
- How can attending to these questions help us move us forward into more hopeful mobility futures? What are the shared values that might make this possible? Where and with whom should we be imagining, designing and testing our future automated mobilities? And what should be our first steps to achieve this collectively and collaboratively?
Professor Sarah Pink, lead of the Transport and Mobilities focus area at the ADM+S Centre and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University said this symposium takes the vital opportunity to bring together leading stakeholders in automated decision-making for our mobility futures to engage through a new agenda that centres the key values of hope, justice and care.
“To achieve safe and trusted automated mobility futures we need to shift the agenda. This means academics from the social sciences and STEM working together with industry, government and not-for-profit stakeholders to envisage futures together. It means putting principles of care and ethics at the core of our work, and it means engaging with diverse people and their possible futures in everyday worlds” said Professor Pink.
Over two days, representatives from industry, government, community organisations and other stakeholders will envision the future of transport mobilities in Australia through panel discussions, research workshops, and short film screenings. Themes will include designing mobilities of care; doing good with mobility data; disability and automated mobilities; and interdisciplinary, interspecies, and multi-stakeholder mobilities.
The symposium includes speakers from CISCO (multinational technology conglomerate corporation), Drive Sweden (driving the development of digitized, connected and shared mobility solutions for a sustainable transport system), Humanitech (harnessing the power of technology for good by putting humanity first), iMove (a national centre for transport and mobility research and development), MACA (a registered charity dedicated to advancing the rights of children with disabilities and medical conditions to safe and accessible transport), National Transport Commission, QLD Department of Transport, She’s a Crowd (countering gender-based violence through data collection activism), Volvo Cars, as well as Deakin University, Halmstad University, Monash University, Swinburne University, University of Cambridge, University of Melbourne, University of NSW, University of Sydney, University of Warwick, and University of Western Australia.
View further information and register for the event by visiting: admscentre.org.au/fam2022
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