Keeping Autonomous Driving Alive: An Ethnography of Visions, Masculinity and Fragility

In Keeping Autonomous Driving Alive, Göde Both studies the relationships between researchers and artifacts held together by contested visions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pioneering research project in Germany, he argues that we can make sense of technological visions only if we simultaneously grasp the role of care, gender, and narrative in sustaining technological research. Both investigates the ambivalence and fragility of technological visions, video demonstrations, and street trials in the hands of researchers invested in self-driving cars. He provides scholars within the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and automotive engineering with a means of reflecting on their involvement in self-driving cars, and offers automotive journalists a unique perspective on the present realities of a futuristic technology.