Workshop “Who’s Driving? Agency and Evidence in the History of Technical Safety”
On December 6/7, 2018, the Subproject 3 of the RG will hold the international workshop “Who’s Driving? Agency and Evidence in the History of Technical Safety” at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.
The workshop aims to have a closer look at the (re-)distribution of responsibility for safety between technology and its users in different technical fields, especially concerning their use as and relevance for practices of evidence for technical safety.
Driverless cars and their ethical and practical implications have been the subject of intense debate lately, in academia as well as in the popular media. Especially prominent in these discussions have been questions of safety and responsibility. While proponents claim that the new technology will save millions of lives by eliminating error-prone human drivers, critics point to new risks about to be created. Who provides what kind of evidence that autonomous cars are really safe in any given situation, and who challenges it? How can it be proven that they will not malfunction catastrophically? Who is responsible if they do – the passengers, the
manufacturers, the programmers, or even the car itself? Who, in that sense, is “driving” a driverless car?
From the historian’s point of view, the attempt to delegate (some) responsibility for safety from the user to technology is of course not a new phenomenon. Since the introduction of the first cars in the late nineteenth century, manufacturers and engineers have… read more
If you would like to participate, please send a brief abstract (around 300 words) and a short CV by July 1, 2018 to Stefan.Esselborn@tum.de