Conference Agenda

The history of driverless cars is characterized by a strange intimacy with the future: The age in which a flawed human driver will be replaced by a reliable machine seems to be as close today as it was in the 1960s: In car shows, laboratories, test drives and now also on the road, the driverless car has always been a near future. Drawing on the discourse on sociotechnical imaginaries (SI) (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2015) and sociological studies of temporality (Grinbaum & Dupuy, 2004; Nordmann, 2014; Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013), the paper develops a procedural perspective on SIs. I argue that SIs are characterized by a specific temporality: Depending on the state of their social newness, they must create a temporal framework in which they become reasonable.

This will be analyzed based on three vignettes: Using the example of the first driverless car in Europe, which was developed in the late 1960s by tire manufacturer Continental for endurance testing, I will show how a world that is “radically different” (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 325) is rationalized as a possible sociotechnical future. The second case uses the example of the car manufacturer Tesla to show that the near future of autonomous driving is further developed and socially embedded in co-production with a community of drivers who identify as pioneers. The third case examines a system of self-driving buses that the city of Monheim am Rhein was one of the first in the world to introduce in 2017. While city marketing emphasizes the degree of innovation of its transport system in public communication, the city’s transport companies invest heavily in making it ‘everyday’ and ‘invisible’.

In all cases, the SI of autonomous driving is characterized by a specific intimacy with the future that I call “technological near-term expectation”: A technological future that is both distant and tangible. As I will show, technological near-term expectation goes beyond imaginaries and narratives but manifests itself in an intimate experience of technology: The moment of boarding the car, the shudder at the apparent agency of the technology, the experience of losing control (Winner, 1977), dealing with errors and the need for repairs (Katzenbach et al., 2024) are bodily experiences of a possible technological future.

Grinbaum, A., & Dupuy, J.-P. (2004). Living with Uncertainty: Toward the Ongoing Normative Assessment of Nanotechnology. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 8(2), 4–25. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne2004822

Jasanoff, S. (2015). Imagined and Invented Worlds. In S. Jasanoff & S.-H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (pp. 321–341). University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119–146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001

Katzenbach, C., Pentzold, C., & Viejo Otero, P. (2024). Smoothing Out Smart Tech’s Rough Edges: Imperfect Automation and the Human Fix. Human-Machine Communication, 7, 23–43. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.7.2

Nordmann, A. (2014). Responsible innovation, the art and craft of anticipation. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 1(1), 87–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2014.882064

Tavory, I., & Eliasoph, N. (2013). Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4), 908–942. https://doi.org/10.1086/668646

Winner, L. (1977). Autonomous Technology.Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. The M!T Press.

This paper develops a theoretical framework for a normative understanding of how the ever-tighter integration of artificial intelligence technologies into workplace processes is transforming workers' personal experiences of autonomous agency, esteem-recognition, and participatory inclusion. Drawing on the recognition-theoretic tradition in critical social theory – especially Axel Honneth's theory of recognition and his recent work on The Working Sovereign (Honneth 2024) – I analyze how techno-social systems are reshaping the conditions under which workers can achieve recognition for their contributions and maintain autonomous agency.

The paper focuses on the diagnosis of three key transformations, for which Honneth's work is especially relevant:

1. Although power tools and machinery have long expanded what workers are able to accomplish "on their own," the introduction of algorithmic tools to support or supplant cognitive and communicative labor greatly expands the domain in which traditional boundaries between individual and technological contributions are blurred, frequently complicating a person's sense of authentic professional competence. What is particularly interesting about the perspective of recognition theory in this context is that (like feminist conceptions of relational autonomy (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000) or the "social model" of disability (Lawson and Beckett 2021), it emphasizes from the outset the unavoidability of reliance on other – also for the development of autonomy. As a result, recognition theory shifts the focus towards more fruitful and nuanced questions about qualitative features of how these dependencies is structured.

2. The expansion of sociotechnical possibilities for increasingly precise, rapid, and uninterrupted assessment of workplace performance – and even automated assessment systems replace human judgment with algorithmic evaluation – are fundamentally altering the intersubjective nature of workplace recognition. Here, a recognition-theoretic perspective is particularly insightful in revealing not only how deep such assessment can cut into the agency of individuals but also the quixotic character of attempts by individuals themselves to address this. This highlights the need to analyze what could be called the "attributional justice" at a structural level, in terms of what Honneth calls an account of "social freedom," in which an awareness of the other's vulnerability to misrecognition is constitutive of, in this case, a good workplace culture.

3 The increasingly "project-character" of work (Celikates, Honneth, and Jaeggi 2023) – facilitated by increasingly modular technologies for distributing and coordinating tasks – accelerates processes of individualization and compartmentalization of work activities. Honneth's approach here provides a the tools for a more insightful analysis of how it is that, in a hyper-networked world, colleagues can feel such a lack of genuine connection to one another.

I conclude by discussion the advantages and disadvantages of Honneth's approach in connection with spillover effects of how these sociotechnical changes are affecting the moral psychology of individuals: given how much of our lives we spend at work, and how pivotal work relations are to our experiences of being esteemed (or denigrated), the workplace becomes a particularly significant locus for the development of skills and attitudes that have implications for many other domains of life.

References

Celikates, Robin, Axel Honneth, and Rahel Jaeggi. 2023. “The Working Sovereign: A Conversation With Axel Honneth.” Journal of Classical Sociology 23 (3): 318–38.

Honneth, Axel. 2024. The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship. Polity.

Lawson, Anna, and Angharad E. Beckett. 2021. “The Social and Human Rights Models of Disability: Towards a Complementarity Thesis.” The International Journal of Human Rights 25 (2): 348–79.

Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar, eds. 2000. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press.