MISSY CUMMINGS: Yes. I got into the boredom research when I was doing a lot of work for the military in their drone programs, and we just saw how operators would just be sitting for hours bored out of their minds and looking for anything to do to stave off the boredom. People can be in literal physical and mental pain when they are exposed to long boredom, vigilance, and monotonous tasking. That's what motivated me to get in there.
But then what I recognized is that the lessons learned in the driving world we are starting to see—and this has been true historically. Aviation is the first to introduce automation, and we see all these problems, and then they all eventually a few years later show up in the automotive world. You can see this in spades in all the Tesla crashes.
I am a big fan of Tesla. I like Teslas, except I am not a big fan of full-self-driving or autopilot because the systems give you the impression that they are more capable than they are, and what we know from years and years of aviation automation research is that automation just has to be good enough. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't even have to be near perfect, but as soon as automation looks like autonomy has some competence and can do a job a little bit, humans have a tendency to get bored very quickly and then give up legitimate authority to automated systems. So we are seeing people crash.
It's almost like a day doesn't go by where I don't get somebody tagging me on Twitter that there has been some new Tesla crash where a person was on autopilot and crashed into the rear end of a fire truck, police car, or the broadside of another truck. Some have been lethal, and some people have lived through them. We have to recognize that this babysitting of automation is a problem in the aviation world, and I do know firsthand that, because the environments are so boring, many of my peers that I flew with in the military—actually I think every man and woman to a T has told me that they wish that they had one what I had done, which is move into academia, because they find that the flying of aircraft can be so boring and tedious.
We've got highly trained people who at least have somebody else in a cockpit to keep them entertained. In cars we don't have that, and people have their cellphones next to them, and they have the neuromuscular lag problem that we talked about before. So now it's like the perfect storm. People have pretty good automation but not perfect, they're bored, their cellphones are there, and "I just need to look at my phone for a little bit," and then something bad happens and I just cannot respond in time.
Boredom is important in autonomous systems because we have to recognize if we don't do something about the way we're designing the job and giving people meaningful work and meaningful activities in that job, that boredom is going to result and then bad things can happen once people are bored.