tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7653648332023631531.post4735886589775319988..comments2023-09-23T00:19:35.915-07:00Comments on High Velocity Human Factors: Automation's Biggest Irony (after all these years): The Non-SurpriseAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15703567509415022352noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7653648332023631531.post-57643951951122741672013-02-04T09:14:17.858-08:002013-02-04T09:14:17.858-08:00This brings a further consideration into play, - a...This brings a further consideration into play, - a type of Human Machine Interface, where the machine is 'responsible' for maintaining Situational Awareness (SA) in the human. This is most easily seen in the autopilot situation Moin refers to, where it could even be viewed (with 20:20 hindsight!) as unreasonable to expect a pilot to react quickly to an automation failure or drop-out, where the automation has been operating a system with a highly complex configuration of states, many of which can be quite abstract. True many of these states will be instantly expected by a well-trained pilot, but unless the pilot is trained -exhaustively- in all possible states of both system and environment (and permutations thereof) then the possibility of a critical loss of SA remains, and the pilot will not have the up-to-date knowledge to act with maximum effectiveness. And let’s not forget the dynamics of the automation-to-pilot failover. Indeed, such a situation can lead to a conflict of 'purpose' between the pilot and aircraft systems, such as the well-known air show crash when the pilot was trying to gain height while the aircraft system was trying to land.<br />I tend to see the solution to this latter conflict as being to make the automation provide better feedback to the pilot, to keep him apprised of the detailed configuration of the system, even while on autopilot, - but even this approach has many problems (the complexity of the configuration and system modes, maintaining attention/interest over long periods of time, - to name but a few).<br />What does the community think?Marianne Lindsellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17929392647455616323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7653648332023631531.post-25586450788081649862013-02-04T09:13:20.483-08:002013-02-04T09:13:20.483-08:00I find this a fascinating area, as to some extent ...I find this a fascinating area, as to some extent it cuts to the root of the role that machines can play in facilitating human activities, so please forgive a bit of a ramble . . <br />As a general point, I am not so surprised that automation works best when workload is light and the task routine, as it seems to me that we give too little emphasis to evaluating where and how automation will be effective in the first place. We seem to have a collective expectation that machines will ultimately be able to replace almost every and any human activity, when in reality machines and human beings differ in their strengths and weaknesses. Indeed automation could be viewed as simply the delegation of human activities to an external system, to free up capacity in our higher thought processes, much as the cerebral hemispheres delegate to the cerebellum, except that 'artificial' automation can extend to new sensors and 'actors' as well.<br />Automation is often faster, more accurate and more reliable (repetitive) than humans at making logical evaluations and inferences where detailed procedures and guidelines (automation protocols) have been provided (by human beings). That the human beings are required to provide the automation protocols in the first place, also has an important benefit, - that a single instance of automation can articulate the collective knowledge, know-how and design efforts of a wide base of subject matter experts. The addition of speed, accuracy and reliability to this makes for a potent combination. One should also keep in mind the immense humanitarian, ethical, economic, risk and engineering benefits in excluding human beings from some activities.<br />However, I submit that humans remain more effective than machines at reacting to the unexpected in keeping with the common values and priorities of humankind (or indeed of social groups, including formalised command structures). These values and priorities can be complex and the ability to articulate them quickly and correctly may require substantial training, and even if it doesn't, it may lean on the psychosocial processes of 'growing up' over time within a particular social or cultural setting. It is very difficult to confer these abilities onto machines, not least because human beings have a variety of indirect ways of applying them, including the accumulation over time of intuition, and the use of affective states (emotions). These latter points also give humans an obvious advantage over machines in relating to other humans. However rigorous the preparation, design and assurance, the very nature of entropy means that events will always be able to take any of an undefinable number of unexpected turns. We try to anticipate and accommodate those eventualities we have experienced (by design), and even try to add in provision for those we can only imagine (usually by generalising from related experiences, but also to some extent by abstract thought), but we can never cover all possibilities. This makes human judgement, initiative and performance under pressure impossible to automate completely. Therefore, in many cases, we may have more success in teaming humans with machines, than in replacing humans with machines; i.e. partial automation rather than total automation.Marianne Lindsellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17929392647455616323noreply@blogger.com