Kim Mills: 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 APA’s 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 Union’s 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 U.S. 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.
David Friedman: Thank you.
Kim Mills: 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?
David Friedman: 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.
Kim Mills: So, are we ready psychologically for self-driving cars?
David Friedman: 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.
Kim Mills: What are what are the pros and cons of self-driving cars? I mean, I think it cuts both ways.
David Friedman: 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.
Kim Mills: 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 went wrong there? I mean, why didn't the car know that the cyclist was there?
David Friedman: 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.
Kim Mills: And yet, we've been talking about self-driving cars for something like 50 years, right, so how are we rushing to market?
David Friedman: 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.
Kim Mills: So, what do you think ultimately is the role of the human being inside a self-driving car?
David Friedman: 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 overlords take over, humans will always be in the loop.
Kim Mills: 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?
David Friedman: 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 going to 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.
Kim Mills: So, what do you see as the role of psychologists in the development of self-driving cars?
David Friedman: 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 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 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?
Kim Mills: So, the car can't just scream “hey stupid, get out of the way.”
David Friedman: 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. 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 2016 it was 37,461 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.
Kim Mills: 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?
David Friedman: 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 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 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 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.
Kim Mills: Any other aspects of self-driving cars that we haven't touched on that you want to talk to people about?
David Friedman: 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 laissez-fair attitude I fear is going to end up delaying the technology.
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.
Kim Mills: Well, thank you very much David Friedman for joining us today. It's been very interesting.
David Friedman: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Kim Mills: Thank you for joining our podcast. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue, about the latest and most exciting psychological research, and Progress Notes, which discusses the practice of psychology. You can find all APA podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, www.speakingofpsychology.org, to listen to more episodes and see more resources on the topics we discuss. I'm Kim Mills, with the American Psychological Association, and this is Speaking of Psychology.
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 Union’s 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.
