Intelligent systems and advanced automation are involved in information
collection and evaluation, in decision-making and in the implementation of
chosen actions. In such systems, human responsibility becomes equivocal.
Understanding human casual responsibility is particularly important when
intelligent autonomous systems can harm people, as with autonomous vehicles or,
most notably, with autonomous weapon systems (AWS). Using Information Theory,
we develop a responsibility quantification (ResQu) model of human involvement
in intelligent automated systems and demonstrate its applications on decisions
regarding AWS. The analysis reveals that human comparative responsibility to
outcomes is often low, even when major functions are allocated to the human.
Thus, broadly stated policies of keeping humans in the loop and having
meaningful human control are misleading and cannot truly direct decisions on
how to involve humans in intelligent systems and advanced automation. The
current model is an initial step in the complex goal to create a comprehensive
responsibility model, that will enable quantification of human causal
responsibility. It assumes stationarity, full knowledge regarding the
characteristic of the human and automation and ignores temporal aspects.
Despite these limitations, it can aid in the analysis of systems designs
alternatives and policy decisions regarding human responsibility in intelligent
systems and advanced automation