ABSTRACT
Responsible Human Delegation refers to the making of a “responsible” decision (i.e., a technically and ethically sound one) to “delegate” a task or function to automation. Delegation implies that there will be at least periods of no human oversight, after some initial period of the human operator’s learning about and perhaps configuring the automation’s behavior and performance. Neglect Tolerance (NT) is a concept from research on human–robotic interaction which, roughly, uses the amount of time a robot can be “neglected” (i.e., have a function delegated to it for autonomous performance) in context while still maintaining an acceptable level of performance. This chapter shows how NT can be adapted to a set of moral or ethical hazards and thereby used to provide a quantitative test of whether or not, in a specified set of conditions with a specified set of automation behaviors, a delegation decision can be “responsible”. We provide a sample analysis using a hypothetical delegation decision and a Bayesian modeling approach, though alternatives are also discussed.
