Relinquishing control

Digital environments are steadily reshaping human interaction with autonomous systems, extending agency beyond information exchange toward delegated authority and decision-making. The historical relationship between human expertise, education and decision-making is beginning to shift. However, when we hand over complex systems or high levels of responsibility to autonomous agents, their decisions will affect our societies in profound ways. How will we share and exchange information across a multiplex of humans and machines?; “What am I being told?”; “Who, or what is telling me?”; “What is the source?” 

As decision environments become increasingly autonomous, we will require increasing levels of technical assistance for predicting and interacting with the behaviors of autonomous agents, realizing an entirely new potential for cooperation and symbiotic creativity.  

A symbiotic relationship

The scope of autonomous agents is set to increase significantly in the near future, already we see their use in financial markets, vehicle control, human support, drone delivery, inventory management and assembly in dangerous environments or explorations. Consumer and enterprise agents increasingly operate across cloud and sensor-based environments, continuously interpreting information, coordinating tasks and supporting routine decision-making at machine scale. They will come to surpass human capability in continuous analysis and routine decision-making. Some ambitions of these agents, however, have shown that the application of perception and critical thinking in expert systems remains, at least for now, dependent on human-based information processing.