Despite the continuing carnage on US roads—more than 40,000 lives were lost in roadway accidents in 2017—poll after poll shows that people are still more comfortable having humans in control of cars than machines.

But fear of a new technology is common and autonomous cars are just the latest target of this apprehension.

In 2015, The Atlantic described how the public was initially alarmed by the proliferation of PCs, and when telephones first appeared, some thought they may be used to communicate with the dead. "Humans often converge around massive technological shifts with a flurry of anxieties," the article noted.

Microsoft's Clippy notwithstanding, one method that has helped humans become more accepting of technology is the anthropomorphizing of gadgets, from creating cute robots to giving voice assistants like Siri a sense of humor.

That's why I found it noteworthy that Waymo CEO John Krafcik recently made a point of saying that the self-driving division of Alphabet Inc. is building a driver and not an autonomous car per se. "At Waymo our goal is to build a self-driving vehicle for every trip for every purpose," Krafcik said at a press conference in New York last month, where Waymo announced a new partnership with Jaguar.

"We can do this because we're building the driver and this same driver can be adapted for all kinds of vehicles," he added.

But depending on how Waymo and other autonomous technology developers approach replacing people with robots behind the wheel, a disembodied "driver" may not be enough to gain the trust of a skeptical public.

The Cutest Thing Google Every Made

When Waymo did build a self-driving vehicle from scratch, its Firefly prototype, it created what Quartz called "the cutest thing" parent company Google ever made. Waymo wrote in a Medium post last year that observers have called the Firefly "the koala car or gumdrop."

This nonthreatening design wasn't an accident. Bryan Reimer, a research scientist in the MIT AgeLab and the associate director of The New England University Transportation Center at MIT, observes that by building a benign prototype, Google sought to mitigate any perception of risk—whether rational or not—that self-driving technology may pose to other road users

Reimer also believes that if companies want self-driving tech to be more accepted by the public, they should create vehicles that look even like less like traditional cars. "A motorcycle doesn't drive like a car," he says, "but everyone knows it does much the same thing."

A similar idea has been applied to intentionally creating robots that don't look human. In 1970, robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the term The Uncanny Valley to define the level of realism in robots that can cause a negative reaction in people.

Perhaps Waymo and other autonomous technology developers could combat the negative perception of self-driving cars—and help make roads safer in the process—by taking a radical approach to vehicle design. Or maybe people want to see more human-like robots in control.

Just as long as these robot "drivers" don't look like Johnny Cab from Total Recall.

Further Reading