Anticipatory automated mobilities

This introduction to the Mobilities Special Issue on Anticipatory Automated Mobilities explores the interplay between automated decision-making (ADM), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) systems in shaping our mobility futures. It argues that “views from the future” are increasingly seen from the perspective of these technologies of automation, shaping how we understand and govern life in the present as if these futures have already arrived. In addressing the persistence of automation as a primary technical apparatus through which the future of mobility is anticipated, this editorial advocates instead for alternatives methods and approaches that can move beyond the often narrow and predetermined understanding of futures. It brings attention to the scale at which automation is being integrated into domains that have traditionally been the central concern of mobilities scholars, and in doing so, contends that the study of mobilities is now the study of computational infrastructure and logics as much as it is the study of bodies and flows. This contemporary moment is characterised not just by a change in scale and intensification of movement but also by its mediation via systems like automation and via concepts like anticipation.