Sense of Agency in an Automated Society – SAGAS

Over the last decades, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has deeply reshaped our daily lives, especially through the intelligent automation of a growing number of processes such as driving, cooking, manufacturing or medical assisting. The constant growth of automation leads to obvious benefits regarding human safety or industrial productivity. However, one might legitimately wonder whether users do feel in control and responsible over actions and outcomes which are mainly achieved – and sometimes decided – by machines or systems. Indeed, the interposition of AI systems between human agents and control processes raises important issues for the sense of agency (SoA) of individuals operating in such increasingly automated societies. SoA is a crucial mechanism not only for users’ experience and systems acceptability, but also with respect to the ethical and cognitive implications of its potential alteration. To our knowledge, there are no proper guidelines or framework dedicated to the development of AI and autonomous systems respectful of human agency. The current research project will aim to explore in a systematic manner the possible ways to restore sense of agency in operators interacting with AI systems, in naturalistic settings, close to daily life situations.
Our objective is twofold. First, through a human-centered approach, we will study how explicability of AI parameters/decisions, within the explainable AI framework (XAI), could be optimized in order to enhance users’ sense of agency, using ecologically valid HMI experiments. Second, we will aim to extract new metrics/proxies of agency in order to provide objective measures, adapted to naturalistic settings, to monitor users’ agency during autonomous driving situations.
By implementing a well-documented hierarchical model of intentions and the action co-representation theory within explainable AI framework, we believe that HMI could approximate naturalistic human joint action, which should consequently improve users’ sense of agency.