Looking for Trouble: Pre‐Intervention Monitoring in Human and AI Driver Training

We compare two types of situations involving monitoring of car driving: a driving instructor overseeing a trainee driver and a safety driver overseeing the performance of autonomous vehicle (AV) software. Our focus is on instances of monitoring that precede (1) interventions that are aborted before impacting the driving and (2) actual interventions on the driving in these two different settings. We find that in both cases the monitoring party “waits and sees” whether each type of “driving agent” will notice the impending trouble and adjust the driving appropriately. However, there are also marked differences: In the case of a driving instructor, the monitoring and intervening is a socially accountable event that may be responded to by the trainee driver, while in the case of an autonomous vehicle there are no such considerations, resulting in a difference in how the monitoring activity is embodied.