EASST/4S meeting Panel 18. Can it Scale?: The scalability zeitgeist, entrepreneurial thinking, and the role of STS
Résumé
The current evolutions of the urban environment are characterized by an increasing use of real-life experiments, be they related to mobility, energy, or data. Recent works in STS have discussed how experiments redefine the practices and objectives of innovation. These works have analyzed the political implications of experiments as they are mobilized as instruments for governing the city. In this paper, we argue that the economic value of experiments is the other side of their potential use as governance instruments, and, as such, deserves analytical scrutiny. Using empirical materials related to tests of self-driving cars involving both multinational industrial companies and smaller firms specializing in autonomous technologies, we analyze how private actors define the present and future economic values of the experiments they are involved in. We identify an emerging market, in which the entities being bought and sold are experiments and their technical and social components. In this market, buyers are cities and national public bodies with ambivalent objectives. Sellers are industrial companies developing technologies (such as sensors) not necessarily related to transportation, and firms specializing in autonomous shuttles fit for experimentation but not expected to function in ways that would answer actual public transportation needs. This market is configured in such a way that each party benefits from the continuous addition of small-scale experiments that have little chance to ever scale up. Thus, we identify an ‘economy of permanent experimentation’, and we use our material materials to discuss its implications for the (re)definition of the common good.