ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in order to understand what might be at stake in warfare vis-à-vis ever more advanced sensing and algorithms, combined with engineering and robotics, must pay attention to the specific ways in which humans and machines share or split tasks, and how their relationship revolves around notions of automation and control. In order to understand who can act in this world and how action comes about, scholars from Science and Technology Studies and New Materialism have developed concepts such as “mangle”, “co-production” “actant” or “intra-action” to analyze the ways in which action comes into being. The notion of human control vis-a-vis notions of Artificial Intelligence, sensor data and robotics forcefully illustrates Suchman’s point about boundary work in the configuration of socio-technical systems. Since the early days of computer systems in applied engineering Human-Computer Interaction has been concerned with the division of labor between humans and computer systems.
