Meaningful Human Control Over Autonomous Systems

Meaningful Human Control Over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

Santoni De Sio, F. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)
van den Hoven, M.J. (TU Delft Values Technology and Innovation)

Values Technology and Innovation

2018

Debates on lethal autonomous weapon systems have proliferated in the past 5 years. Ethical concerns have been voiced about a possible raise in the number of wrongs and crimes in military operations and about the creation of a “responsibility gap” for harms caused by these systems. To address these concerns, the principle of “meaningful human control” has been introduced in the legal–political debate; according to this principle, humans not computers and their algorithms should ultimately remain in control of, and thus morally responsible for, relevant decisions about (lethal) military operations. However, policy-makers and technical designers lack a detailed theory of what “meaningful human control” exactly means. In this paper, we lay the foundation of a philosophical account of meaningful human control, based on the concept of “guidance control” as elaborated in the philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility. Following the ideals of “Responsible Innovation” and “Value-sensitive Design,” our account of meaningful human control is cast in the form of design requirements. We identify two general necessary conditions to be satisfied for an autonomous system to remain under meaningful human control: first, a “tracking” condition, according to which the system should be able to respond to both the relevant moral reasons of the humans designing and deploying the system and the relevant facts in the environment in which the system operates; second, a “tracing” condition, according to which the system should be designed in such a way as to grant the possibility to always trace back the outcome of its operations to at least one human along the chain of design and operation. As we think that meaningful human control can be one of the central notions in ethics of robotics and AI, in the last part of the paper, we start exploring the implications of our account for the design and use of non-military autonomous systems, for instance, self-driving cars.

meaningful human control
autonomous weapon systems
responsibility gap
ethics of robotics
responsible innovation in robotics
value-sensitive design in robotics
AI ethics
ethics of autonomous systems
OA-Fund TU Delft

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f1a5cd1a-ea29-4495-a971-96ddc4e22cb6

https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00015

2296-9144

Frontiers In Robotics and AI, 5

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 F. Santoni De Sio, M.J. van den Hoven