From Autonomous Systems to Sociotechnical Systems: Designing Effective Collaborations

Effectiveness in sociotechnical systems often depends on coordination among multiple agents (including both humans and autonomous technologies). This means that autonomous technologies must be designed to function as collaborative systems, or team players. In many complex work domains, success is beyond the capabilities of humans unaided by technologies. However, at the same time, human capabilities are often critical to ultimate success, as all automated control systems will eventually face problems their designers did not anticipate. Unfortunately, there is often an either/or attitude with respect to humans and technology that tends to focus on optimizing the separate human and autonomous components, with the design of interfaces and team processes as an afterthought. The current paper discusses the limitations of this approach and proposes an alternative where the goal of design is a seamless integration of human and technological capabilities into a well-functioning sociotechnical system. Drawing lessons from both the academic (SRK Framework) and commercial (IBM's Watson, video games) worlds, suggestions for enriching the coupling between the human and automated systems by considering both technical and social aspects are discussed.