Would you bully a driverless car or show it respect?

Say you’re driving down a two-way street and there’s a truck unloading a delivery in the opposite lane. The oncoming traffic needs to pull out into your lane to overtake.

What do you do?

【小题1】 Eventually one of us feels charitable and slows down to allow the oncoming car to overtake and give permission with a quick flash of headlights or a beckoning wave.

But what if the car waiting patiently behind the parked truck is a driverless or autonomous vehicle (AV)? Will this robot car be able to understand what you mean when you flash your lights or wave your hands?

Its sensors could decide that it’s only safe to overtake when there’s no oncoming traffic at all. On a busy road at school home time, this may be never, leading to increasingly angry drivers queuing behind.   【小题2】 This is one of the conclusions to be drawn from research carried out by Dr Chris Tennant of the psychological and behavioural science department at the London School of Economics.

His Europe-wide survey finds that nearly two-thirds of drivers think machines won’t have enough common sense to interact with human drivers, and more than two-fifths think a robot car would remain stuck behind our assumed parked truck for a long time.

Driving isn’t just about technology and engineering; it’s about human interactions and psychology. The road is a social space. 【小题3】 “If you view the road as a social space, you will consciously negotiate your journey with other drivers. People who like that negotiation process appear to feel less comfortable engaging with AVs than with human drivers,” says Mr Tennant in his report.

【小题4】 That skepticism usually diminishes with usage, however.