ABSTRACT
The drive to refer to autonomous technologies as “teammate” favors a simplistic metaphor of anthropomorphized technology over a more complex analysis of the social nature of these tools and their use. Activity theory in its general form posits that all human activity is mediated by tools, both cognitive and physical. The language of “teammate” and “trust” applied to autonomous tools arguably mistakes the mediation of subject-object relations for subject-subject relations. Addressing the real problems of working with opaque tools may be better served by using theoretical perspectives that view autonomous technologies as complex tools or extensions to the human mind and body directed toward achieving human goals. Systemic structural activity theory proposes “functional analysis” as a method of analyzing how a human regulates their use of tools, even those considered “autonomous,” toward the desired human end. Systemic structural activity theory offers a coherent theoretical approach to the analysis of issues of human-autonomy interaction when reconceptualized as the ability to self-regulate a human activity using autonomous tools.
