Social Implications 16.422 Human Supervisory Control ? Improve: – Efficiency & productivity – Task performance & reliability ? Human safety, both operators & public – Remote operations ? Reduction of human labor ? Technological advancements ? Improved quality of life – Health care –Leisure ? But there are some problems…. 16.422 Advantages of Automation Automation Issues for the Individual ?Employment – Centralization of management – Identity & desocialization ? Work dissatisfaction – Supervising as opposed to interactive control ? Technological (il)literacy ? Deskilling ? Responsibility & accountability – Trust and biases ? “It will always be far easier to make a robot of a man rather that to make a robot like a man.” (Engelberger 1981) 16.422 Problems with Automation for Society ? “Technological imperative” – Technological determinism as opposed to social construction ? Productivity vs. meaningfulness ? Tele-governance – Feed forward versus feedback –Privacy ? Cell phones, automobiles, employee monitoring ? Reduced social contact 16.422 More Problems with Automation… ? System complexity & cost – Affects both the individual and groups ? Group diffusion of accountability ? Impact on natural resources ? Tele-robotic spies ? Over-trusting technology ? Smart weapons 16.422 A Comparison of Nuclear vs. Command & Control Domains Factor\Domain Nuclear Power Plant Command & Control Start-up Only when conditions are normal A response to an unexpected problem Shutdown Automatic on abnormality Hard to stop once started Experience Hundreds of plant years Very little Personnel Semi-permanent High turnover Error records Public Secret Simulation Accidents can be simulated Difficult to do in realistic settings Goal state Control nature Control intelligent opponent Scientific analysis Open Secret 16.422 Automation & Weapons in the Future Proposed Tactical Tomahawk Missions L P H p Emergent Mission Default Mission P T Flex Mission G W A T B P D T L Time-critical (emergent) Target Controlling Multiple Autonomous Vehicles/Weapons In-Flight Monitor MapRetargeting Display Resistance to Killing as a Function of Distance Obedience & Remoteness ? Milgram studies of 1960’s – Deception experiment under the guise of ‘learning’ ? When the learner was in sight, 70% of the subjects refused to administer the shocks as opposed to only 35% who resisted when the subject was located in a remote place, completely out of contact with the teacher. ? Milgram proposed “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon. ? Highly applicable to surgical strike weaponry Assigning Moral Agency to Computers ? Do people assign moral agency to computers? – Low observability: High levels of automation authority but little feedback for the human operator ? Can cause humans to view the automated system as an independent agent capable of willful action (Sarter & Woods 1994) – Friedman and Millet study in 1997 – Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) system ? Prognostic system for removal of groups of individuals from life support ? Consultation tool vs. legitimate authority ? The danger: Automated recommendations could become a heuristic which becomes the default condition that requires little cognitive investigation. Designing a Moral Buffer Group & Agency Accountability ? Social accountability is defined as people having to explain and justify their social judgments about others – Social loafing ? Nissenbaum’s Four Barriers – The problem of “many hands” – Software glitches (bugs) – The computer is seen as a scapegoat – Ownership without liability. ? “Government Contractor's Defense” Swarming Technology A significant human supervisory control problem of the future… Aerovironment Black Widow IAI Scout Gen. Atomics – Predator B Boeing X-45A UCAV And the future? The speed of technologically fed developments does not leave itself the time for self-correction – the further observation that in whatever time is left the corrections will become more and more difficult and the freedom to make them more and more restricted –Jonas, 1979 ? Retention of responsibility & accountability ? Operator free will vs. design constraints ? Reliability vs. creativity ?Complexity ? Joint constraint interactions 16.422 Issues to Consider for the Future (Sheridan)… Fully Manual Fully Automatic Unpredictable Completely Predictable Menial Labor Automation Best Human Best Supervisory Control Frontier Ultimate Robot ? T. B. Sheridan, Telerobotics, Automation, and Human Supervisory Control. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ? Grossman, D. (1995). On Killing. Boston: Little Brown & Co. ? Milgram, S. (1975). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row. ? Sarter, N. B., & Woods, D. D. (1994l). Decomposing Automation: Autonomy, Authority, Observability and Perceived Animacy. First Automation Technology and Human Performance Conference. ? Nissenbaum, H. (1995). Computing and Accountability. In H. Nissenbaum & D. G. Johnson (Eds.), Computers, Ethics, and Social Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ? Jonas, H. (1979). The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 16.422 References