Thermodynamics 2.0 | 2022 Program: Sessions and Abstracts

Mon - Wed, July 18 - July 20 , 2022 , Boone, North Carolina

Session T10: Dissipative Structure

15:15-16:15. Tuesday July 19, 2022

Chair: Michael Francis McCullough

Title: Exploring a Thermodynamics of Interdependence for Autonomous Human-Machine Teams with Case Studies

Presenter:

  • William Lawless

(Paine College, Augusta, GA)

Bio-sketch

Short bio: W.F. Lawless was a mechanical engineer in charge of nuclear waste management in 1983 when he blew the whistle on the Department of Energy’s (DOE) mismanagement of radioactive wastes. For his PhD topic on group dynamics, he theorized about the causes of tragic mistakes made by large organizations with world-class scientists and engineers. After his PhD in 1992, DOE invited him to join its citizen advisory board (CAB) at DOE’s Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC. As a founding member of DOE's SRS CAB, he coauthored numerous recommendations on environmental remediation from radioactive wastes. He was the SRS CAB co-technical advisor on incineration, 2000-03, and technical advisor in 2009. He was a member of the European Trustnet hazardous decisions group. He is a senior member of IEEE. His research today is on the metrics for, and entropy generation by, autonomous human-machine teams (A-HMT). He is the lead editor of five books (Springer 2016; 2017; CRC 2018; Elsevier 2019; 2020). He has organized and had published a 6-article special issue on “human-machine teams and explainable AI” by AI Magazine (2019). He was a co-editor for the Naval Research & Development Enterprise (NRDE) Applied Artificial Intelligence Summit, October 2018, San Diego. He has authored or co-authored over 80 articles and book chapters, over 150 peer-reviewed proceedings and received almost $2 million in research grants. He has co-organized ten AAAI symposia at Stanford (2020: AI welcomes Systems Engineering: Towards the science of interdependence for autonomous human-machine teams; https://aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss20symposia.php#ss03).

Author(s):

  • William Lawless

(Paine College, Augusta, GA)

images

Abstract:T10.120

Abstract

Autonomy has begun to receive significant attention, but neither the theory nor the science has developed sufficiently to be able to design and operate an autonomous human-machine system (HMS). In this report, we review the shift from laboratory studies, which have been unable to advance the science of autonomy, to a theory of autonomy in open and uncertain environments along with supporting evidence from case studies. The need for this shift we attribute to the focus by the social sciences primarily on a science of individual, independent agents, whether for humans or machines, a focus that has been unable to generalize to new theory and new predictions. This failure of traditional social science (including economics) predicated on the individual cannot even reconstruct the social events being studied and is the problem to be overcome as prelude to solving the thermodynamics we explore. We introduce a concept from Gibbs for the energy available and entropy capacity of a team in operation by assuming it crudely approximates a fluid. As part of this review, we present a case study of how an Uber self-driving car and its operator failed to prevent a pedestrian fatality; how the US Air Force made a tragic mistake with a drone attack in Afghanistan; and how the US Department of Energy overcame the extraordinary environmental damage its practices inflicted across the USA. To advance the science, we reject independence among teammates as a viable scientific approach for teams and instead explore what we know about a theory of interdependence for human-machine systems.

Keywords: autonomy, human-machine system, interdependence, thermodynamics