Meet the Academics Trying to Stop You From Having Sex in Robotaxis

遇见那些试图阻止你在自动驾驶出租车里“做爱做的事”的学者们

Pavlo Bazilinskyy still can’t believe he was on PornHub for work. He’s an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and has spent more than a decade researching AI-driven interactions between humans and robots. But he found himself typing “public transport” into the search bar of a very specific website’s “amateur section.” 297 hits.

Pavlo Bazilinskyy 至今仍不敢相信自己竟然为了工作浏览了 PornHub。他是荷兰埃因霍温理工大学的助理教授，过去十多年来一直致力于研究人工智能驱动下的人机交互。但他发现自己当时正对着那个特定网站的“业余板块”搜索栏，输入“公共交通”四个字。结果显示有 297 条相关视频。

“People are hard to predict,” Bazilinskyy says. It’s why he researches what he does. So his prurient pursuit had a point. Robotaxis without cabbies behind the wheel have started picking up passengers in a handful of countries, including the US. Meanwhile, there’s a long history of people getting up to antisocial behavior inside the quasi-private or straight-up public spaces of trains, planes, and automobiles—think the prom night limo, the “Mile High Club,” Tom Cruise in slow motion aboard the Chicago L in Risky Business, the stuff he found on PornHub.

“人类是很难预测的，”Bazilinskyy 说。这就是他从事这项研究的原因。所以，他这种看似“好色”的追求其实是有目的的。在包括美国在内的少数国家，没有司机的自动驾驶出租车已经开始接载乘客。与此同时，人们在火车、飞机和汽车等半私密或完全公共的空间里进行反社会行为有着悠久的历史——想想毕业舞会之夜的豪华轿车、“高空俱乐部”（Mile High Club）、电影《乖仔也疯狂》（Risky Business）中汤姆·克鲁斯在芝加哥地铁上的慢镜头，以及他在 PornHub 上看到的那些内容。

What might riders do when there’s no authority figure inside a vehicle to say, “Hey, stop that!”? What do they do? Can people be convinced to stop before they start?

当车内没有权威人物出面制止说“嘿，住手！”时，乘客们会做什么？他们到底会干什么？我们能否在人们开始行动之前就说服他们停止？

This week, Bazilinskyy and academic colleagues with backgrounds in systems engineering, computer science, psychology, and tourism studies are hosting an industry workshop asking participants to brainstorm along those very lines: How do you stop people from doing it in self-driving cars? Thinking about sex in autonomous vehicles, they theorize, can let anyone who cares about the future of mobility “stress-test” the role the vehicles might eventually play as communal spaces, where social norms get acted out every day.

本周，Bazilinskyy 和他在系统工程、计算机科学、心理学和旅游研究领域的学术同事们举办了一场行业研讨会，要求参与者围绕这些问题进行头脑风暴：如何阻止人们在自动驾驶汽车里做那种事？他们认为，思考自动驾驶汽车里的性行为，可以让所有关心未来出行的人对这些车辆进行“压力测试”，看看它们最终作为公共空间将扮演什么样的角色，以及社会规范如何在这些空间中被日常践行。

The event focuses on prevention not just because these academics are no fun (though Alexandros Rouchitsas, an engineering psychologist who is also hosting the event, admits they are “taking the side of the parents, the elderly—we are not the cool people here”). They don’t want people to have sex in self-driving cars because they’re worried it will give a potentially positive technology a really bad rep.

这次活动聚焦于预防，不仅仅是因为这些学者们“不解风情”（尽管同样作为活动主办方的工程心理学家 Alexandros Rouchitsas 承认，他们是在“站在父母和老人的立场上——我们确实不是那种酷酷的人”）。他们不希望人们在自动驾驶汽车里发生性行为，是因为担心这会给一项本具积极意义的技术带来极坏的名声。

“We want to see automated mobility solutions accepted, trusted by the general public,” Rouchitsas says. Self-driving could have huge upsides for the elderly, children, and people with disabilities, who have a harder time getting around places where driving is quicker and sometimes necessary. The tech might eventually move beyond private taxis and into public transit, where all sorts of people should be able to travel safely and comfortably. “We want automated mobility solutions to be seen as something that is equitable, serious, societally minded,” he says.

“我们希望看到自动驾驶出行方案能被大众接受和信任，”Rouchitsas 说。自动驾驶对于老年人、儿童和残障人士来说可能具有巨大的优势，因为在那些开车更快且有时必不可少的地方，他们出行往往更困难。这项技术最终可能会超越私人出租车，进入公共交通领域，让各类人群都能安全舒适地出行。“我们希望自动驾驶出行方案被视为一种公平、严肃且具有社会责任感的事物，”他说。

Rouchitsas’ biggest fear is that self-driving gets co-opted by the partiers, the drug users, the sort of hedonistic folk who have descended on some islands of his native Greece. “You know ‘Bang Bus’?” he says. “We don’t want that.”

Rouchitsas 最担心的是，自动驾驶会被派对狂欢者、吸毒者以及那些曾涌入他家乡希腊某些岛屿的享乐主义者所利用。“你知道‘Bang Bus’（色情系列片）吗？”他说，“我们可不希望那样。”

The four-hour workshop—rise and shine, it starts at 8:30 am—is part of an industry conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on how people interact with vehicles and larger mobility systems. The organizers expect participants from academia but also the wider industry. (Gothenburg is home to Volvo Cars and the tech supplier SmartEye; BMW and Google are conference sponsors.) Those who show up will be prompted to come up with physical and design interventions that encourage people to not do that. The workshop will focus on preventing consensual interactions, its organizers say.

这场为期四小时的研讨会（早起吧，会议早上 8:30 开始）是瑞典哥德堡一场行业会议的一部分，会议重点探讨人类如何与车辆及更广泛的出行系统进行交互。组织者预计参与者将来自学术界以及更广泛的行业。（哥德堡是沃尔沃汽车和技术供应商 SmartEye 的所在地；宝马和谷歌是此次会议的赞助商。）与会者将被要求提出物理和设计方面的干预措施，以鼓励人们不要在车内做那种事。组织者表示，研讨会将重点关注如何预防此类自愿行为。

Rouchitsas, who studies human-machine interactions, says he hopes participants will get creative with their anti-action designs. But just off the top of his head: Maybe the vehicles could be transparent? Maybe a light begins to blink if the technology senses behavior it disapproves of? The organizers intend to publish a paper based on the workshop’s results.

研究人机交互的 Rouchitsas 表示，他希望参与者能在防范设计上发挥创意。他随口提了一些想法：也许车辆可以设计成透明的？也许当技术检测到不被允许的行为时，车内灯光会开始闪烁？组织者打算根据研讨会的结果发表一篇论文。

Sex is the fun, eye-catching part here, made all the more alluring because it’s “the elephant in the room” for those thinking about how humans might interact with machines in the future, says Bazilinskyy—very under-studied. But the results of this sort of inquiry could help designers, companies, and lawmakers figure out how to compel people to safely share communal spaces like public self-driving buses in the future.

Bazilinskyy 说，性行为是这里最有趣、最引人注目的部分，之所以更具吸引力，是因为对于那些思考人类未来如何与机器交互的人来说，这是一个“房间里的大象”（显而易见却被刻意回避的问题），且目前研究极少。但这类研究的结果可以帮助设计师、公司和立法者找到方法，引导人们在未来安全地共享公共自动驾驶巴士等公共空间。

Prevent sex and maybe you’ll also prevent robbery, bullying, and homicide. “It could be helpful for the industry and academics to use this example to design other things,” he says.

预防了性行为，或许也能预防抢劫、霸凌和谋杀。“对于行业和学术界来说，利用这个例子来设计其他事物可能会有所帮助，”他说。