55 2 EXTENSIVE LITERATURE REVIEW 2.10 FROM ACCOUNTABILITY VIA CONTROL TO HUMAN OVERSIGHT Several scholars describe the relationship between accountability and control. According to Bovens (2007) there is a fine line between accountability and control. Koppell (2005, p. 97) states that: ‘If X can induce the behavior of Y, it is said that X controls Y—and that Y is accountable to X.’ Radin and Romzek (1996) link types of accountability relationships to the degree (high or low) and source (internal or external) of control. Koppell (2005) notes that this seems to mix different types of accountability relationships which is in his sense a weakness of this approach. According to Lupia (in Bovens 2007, p. 453): ‘An agent is accountable to a principal if the principal can exercise control over the agent’. Bovens (2007) contests this by stating that although accountability mechanisms are important to control the behaviour of organizations, control in the Anglo-Saxon sense means ‘having power over’ and can be achieved by ‘very proactive means of directing conduct’. Examples of these proactive means are direct orders, laws, regulations and directives. These means are not accountability mechanisms themselves because they are not procedures in which an actor has to justify and explain his or her conduct to a forum. Bovens (2007) concludes by stating that: ‘Accountability is a form of control, but not all forms of control are accountability mechanisms.’ The question then is if human control can ground effective mechanisms of accountability in relation to the behaviour of agents and institutions who deploy Autonomous Weapon Systems. We will argue, that we need to broaden this view towards oversight, and more specifically what we will call: Comprehensive Human Oversight mechanisms. 2.11 CONTROL Control has traditionally been defined in different ways, depending on application domains. In this section we describe the perspectives from the engineering, sociotechnical and governance point of view based on the layers described by Van den Berg (2015) (see Figure 6). Engineering perspective Control from an engineering perspective can be described as a mechanism that compares the output of another system or device to the input and goal function by means of a feedback loop to take action to minimize the difference between outcome and goal. These control systems can range from very simple, e.g. household thermostats, to very complex, for example nuclear power plant control (Åström & Kumar, 2014; Pigeau & McCann, 2002). In general, a control system has four common characteristics: (1)
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