Introduction: The Making of Decisions and Technological Decisionism

This book is about the phenomenon of autonomous driving—not what it is from a strictly ‘technical’ perspective but where the dream of it has led us in recent years. It considers the ongoing, complex, costly, and contentious quest to automate driving offering a sustained focus on the ‘advance decisions’ deemed necessary to emulate the most ordinary of driving decisions, from turning a corner or merging onto a motorway, to stopping at traffic lights. This book considers how mapping, sensing, and algorithmic capabilities are gifted to autonomous vehicles through technical work performed by an array of actors in multiple locations: from computer science students performing data annotation work in industry-funded research centres to software developers building image-based machine learning (ML) models at autonomous vehicle start-ups.