A Philosophical Challenge: The Structure and Performance of Interdependent Autonomous Human-Machine Teams and Systems

Abstract

The concept of autonomy in human-machine teams and systems has become in­creasingly important, yet the concept of autonomy remains elusive to researchers and to philosophers; it either evokes non-autonomous swarms under central or a leader’s control, or that the teammates require a level of intelligence as they perform, but today, intelligence does not generalize from independent humans to human-machine systems. However, some researchers locate intelligence not in the individual members of a team, but in the interactions among the members of a team in a system of teams, opening the possibility of computational auto­nomy based on a metric of entropy production. We also know that a team, com­posed of interdependent teammates, is more productive than the same members who work independently; we do not know why, but we suspect offsetting en­tropy production from the complementary parts of a team when a highly interde­pendent team has been formed into a cohesive unit. Interdependence implies state dependency. We explore these concepts briefly and at an introductory level, including the state-dependency models that have achieved great predictive suc­cess in quantum mechanics while at the same time failing to be intuitive or to be­ing open to a philosophical understanding. That highly predictive, state-depen­dent quantum models leave meaning open to interpretation makes these models non-traditional and non-rational, requiring a trial-and-error randomness in these systems and while identifiable by a system’s entropy production, but a challenge for philosophical interpretation.