Digital navigation and the driving-machine: supervision, calculation, optimization, and recognition

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore the navigational implications of a possible driving world. In the last few years, autonomous vehicles (AVs) have garnered significant attention, with much of this scrutiny centered on the technical possibilities, legal restrictions, and utilitarian ethics of AVs. In this paper, I look at how AVs are radically transforming the nature of navigational decision-making. Research into the automation of industrial processes and aircraft fly-by-wire systems suggests that navigational supervision, by humans, will become a significant duty, recalibrating navigation itself. I draw out the implications of automation through three navigational practices of the ‘driving-machine’ I refer to as route-calculation, terrain-optimization, and object-recognition. Attending to these practices assists in the ongoing interrogation of the machinic rendering of automobile space.

KEYWORDS:

• Automation
• autonomous vehicles (AVs)
• calculation
• driving
• navigation
• terrain
• sensing

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Brenden Doody and Debbie Hopkins for organizing the Systems of (auto)mobility II session at the RGS 2017 Annual Conference, in which this paper was first presented. Thanks to attendees of the Locating Media Kolloquium for feedback on an early draft. Thanks to Henrik Örnebring for conversations on data and valuation. Thanks to Peter Merrington and Ilana Mitchell for alerting me to the existence of the stack interchange. Finally, thanks to both reviewers for their constructive feedback. Any errors within are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The first four-stack interchange was built in Los Angeles in 1953 and adorns the front cover of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Banham [1971] 2009).

2. Both object-recognition and terrain-optimization are kinds of hazard-perception. I do not use the term hazard-perception to avoid conflating the two.