The metaphysical impact of automation

Earlier this month, I crawled into Dr. Wendy Ju's autonomous car simulator to explore the future of human-machine interfaces at CornellTech's Tata Innovation Center. Dr. Ju recently moved to the Roosevelt Island campus from Stanford University. While in California, the roboticist was famous for making videos capturing people's reactions to self-driving cars using students disguised as "ghost-drivers" in seat costumes. Professor Ju's work raises serious questions of the metaphysical impact of docility.