Image from Vox
There are no self-driving cars hiding under your bed.
Self-driving cars are now becoming all the rage, but it turns out not everyone views them as completely positive. Some people actually see automated cars as “terrifying” or “creepy”, while some simply don’t believe that technology can pull off a ‘human’s’ job so efficiently. Others, on the other hand, are just scared that self-driving cars may reduce the need for a driver after all.
According to a study done on about 404 participants through Mechanical Turk, acceptance of self-driving cars is actually related to the belief about their safety and was negatively influenced by the ‘creep factor’ of seeing a car without a driver.
The study also revealed that men were more likely to accept self-driving cars rather than women, which points to women being more conservative about these things than men.
The biggest factor though? Why, it’s easy: in the world of Digital Trends, the key to accepting self-driving cars is simply based in one’s “faith in superior abilities of machine.”
“In this study, the strongest predictor for accepting self-driving cars was posthuman ability, the belief that computers can surpass humans in this particular task,” says Andre Gambino, who led this particular study. “We have come to a point now where we should no longer be talking about machines approximating humans in their ability, but, rather, outperforming humans. In the sense of safety, in reliability, in doing tasks without becoming tired, there are many arguments to be made that machines have transcended human abilities.”
Another professor, S. Shyam, Sundar, says, “Designers may need to think in a different way, for example, there’s no need to design in-car and dashboard interfaces based on what a human driver would normally use.”
