Technology readiness levels for policy making: Lessons from the autonomous vehicle hype cycle

Emerging technologies arrive accompanied by promotional hype that can distort policy responses, prompting governments to pursue premature regulatory action or inappropriate interventions. This study proposes that policy advisers use Technology Readiness Levels to cut through technological hype and calibrate policy recommendations to technological maturity. We develop a framework that pairs four stages of technology development (research, development, testing, and deployment) with appropriate policy responses ranging from monitoring to full-scale regulation. To test this framework, we analyze 829 recommendations from 62 US state-level autonomous vehicle (AV) policy reports produced during a period characterized by industry hype around self-driving cars. Our analysis suggests hype influenced policy advice. During peak industry hype (2014–15), 40% of recommendations were deployment-appropriate but autonomous vehicles had achieved only limited testing. Recommendations became more conservative by 2016–17 (deployment-appropriate recommendations dropped to 24%). Our results suggest that policy advisors initially relied on overly optimistic industry projections but soon developed more realistic assessments. This is evidence of both the influence of the hype cycle and an implicit desire to tailor recommendations to the current state of the emerging technology. We offer advisors a framework to articulate the state of emerging technology independent of hype in order to propose appropriate responses.