Defense against the dark cars: Design principles for griefing of autonomous vehicles

Abstract

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) become a reality on public roads, researchers and designers are beginning to see unexpected reactions from the public ranging from curiosity to vandalism. These behaviors are concerning, as AV platforms will need to know how to deal with people behaving unexpectedly or aggressively. We call this grie.ng of AVs, adopting the term from harassment in online gaming. We discuss several examples of grie.ng observed in onroad field studies using a Wizard-of-Oz driverless car. While Uber and Waymo have anecdotally mentioned vandalism towards AVs, we believe this to be the. rst public video available of AV grie.ng ranging from playful to aggressive. To stimulate discussion, we propose speculative design principles to address griefing.