Winging it: visions, automation, and narrating alternative mobility futures

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the way that futures for autonomous mobility are envisioned, specifically in industry representations. We begin by analysing a pair of representative commercial narratives around future autonomous mobility, from Wing and Audi, finding them to be simplistic, exclusionary, and focused on individual freedoms. Building on this analysis, we draw on ideas around mobility justice and creative mobilities methods to craft an alternative science fiction vignette, one that augments a future from a gig worker’s perspective. In doing so, we foreground multiple injustices and insecurities, and aim to highlight the potential within creative and narrative methods to complicate dominant stories about technological futures, to articulate alternative futures, explore them, research with them, and make other futures more tangible. The paper concludes by discussing the need for such approaches given the dominant framings around autonomous mobility futures.