The Coming Revolution in Transportation: Self-Driving Cars

Are moral choices universal? What will the future look like with autonomous vehicles? How do self-driving cars know where they are? How do cultural factors play into ethical decision-making? These thought-provoking questions represent just a handful of the topics that students in the ExCollege class The Coming Revolution in Transportation: Self-Driving Cars are confronting head-on. And they’re doing so not only in the classroom, but by researching and writing articles on their Medium blog that allows them to “present their thoughts and dig into lots of relevant issues,” according to James Intrilligator, who runs the Human Factors Engineering program at Tufts. He is co-teaching this semester’s course with Hal Miller-Jacobs, a lecturer in Organizational and Engineering Psychology, also at Tufts. It’s undeniable that asking students to reflect meaningfully and articulate their thoughts on such a complex subject makes sense. After all, to very loosely paraphrase a certain Dr. Emmett Brown, we might not need any roads where we’re going — but a map definitely doesn’t hurt.

Hal Miller-Jacobs and James Intrilligator, pictured in the top-right photo, arranged for a Tesla Models S to be parked on the academic quad.

Both Miller-Jacobs, who has worked as a project director at the UX design firm Human Factors International and also as a usability coach, and Intrilligator, who spent “several years running think-tanks at high-tech and VC firms in Boston and Los Angeles” before teaching, bring real-life experience and a grounded perspective to the class. But even these two professionals don’t shy away from waxing poetic about what they’re teaching.

“It’s about fact, fiction, dreams, and realities. How the technology is moving this field forward and how autonomous vehicles will change the future world’s landscape: literally — cities and highways — and metaphorically — concepts of transport, ethics, law, and environmentalism,” says Intrilligator.

Miller-Jacobs, the proud owner of a Tesla Model 3, is even more enthusiastically evocative about the “monumental” effect that self-driving cars, still in their relative infancy, will have on society. It’ll be as “impactful as the Industrial Revolution,” he predicts, and it’s “important for Tufts students to be at the forefront of this monumental shift and potentially being part of this revolution.”

Those are heady predictions, but that’s not to say that self-driving cars aren’t already drastically changing not only the highways of America but also the way we live — and plan to live — in the near future in more practical ways. The instructors regularly bring in guest speakers who attest to that. “We have had a blind engineer speaking about how the technology will change his life, and the CEO of an organization that is building software to determine the intent and awareness of pedestrians in traffic,” says Miller-Jacobs. Rachel Stein, a recent Tufts graduate who’s now pursuing a Master's in Human Factors Engineering and is the teaching assistant for the class, says her favorite part of studying self-driving cars is the potential they have to radically improve accessibility. “The technology presents an incredible opportunity to help people who can't drive or get around themselves,” she explains, citing the opportunity to “hear from leading professionals in the self-driving car industries about their experiences and insights” as one of her favorite parts of the class.

Jim Sproul, Founder and Manager Director of The Sproul Company, gave students an overview of Boston activities in autonomous vehicles.

Intrilligator and Miller-Jacobs’s students may be a bit far from being experts in their field, but after a quick scroll through their research posted on the Medium blog, you’d be forgiven for believing they’re well on their way. To highlight just a couple, for example, senior George Triantafillou analyzed the implications of California granting the Google-affiliated self-driving car company Waymo permission to test their fully autonomous vehicles on the state’s highways. First-year student Sierra Heuvelman took a closer look at the automotive radar sensors manufactured by the Israeli company Arbe Robotics, while junior David Ngetich explained how self-driving cars can use machine learning to improve their cybersecurity and ward off hacking attempts. It’s pretty clear that these students are already prepared to be at the forefront of the revolution, whatever shape or form it ends up evolving into.

At the end of the day, the key thing is to “keep exploring what you're interested in; you never know where there might be opportunity to take part and make a tangible difference,” says Stein. Her emphasis on staying curious and optimistic about the technological developments in our ever-changing world is echoed by Intrilligator’s parting advice, albeit with a little tongue-in-cheek twist: “The future will be awesome! But, be ready to ask questions, dig deep, and fight off SkyNet.”

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About the Author

Max Lalanne is a senior majoring in Film & Media Studies. Born in Paris and raised in New Hampshire, when he's not writing for The ExPress, he's running his own daily newsletter, News in French. He plans to continue a career in media and publishing.