The interplay between human and machine agency

Abstract

Human-machine networks affect many aspects of our lives: from sharing experiences with family and friends, knowledge creation and distance learning, and managing utility bills or providing feedback on retail items, to more specialised networks providing decision support to human operators and the delivery of health care via a network of clinicians, family, friends, and both physical and virtual social robots. Such networks rely on increasingly sophisticated machine algorithms, e.g., to recommend friends or purchases, to track our online activities in order to optimise the services available, and assessing risk to help maintain or even enhance people’s health. Users are being offered ever increasing power and reach through these networks by machines which have to support and allow users to be able to achieve goals such as maintaining contact, making better decisions, and monitoring their health. As such, this comes down to a synergy between human and machine agency in which one is dependent in complex ways on the other. With that agency questions arise about trust, risk and regulation, as well as social influence and potential for computer-mediated self-efficacy. In this paper, we explore these constructs and their relationships and present a model based on review of the literature which seeks to identify the various dependencies between them.