57 2 EXTENSIVE LITERATURE REVIEW Governance perspective The governance perspective on control describes which institutions or forums supervise the behaviour of agents to govern their activities. Pesch (2015) argues that there is no institutional structure for engineers which calls on them to recognize, reflect upon and actively integrate values into the designs on a structural basis. The result is that the moral effects of a design can only be evaluated and adjusted after the implementation in society. Pesch (2015) notes that engineers relate to different institutional domains, such as the market, the state and science. The consequence is that engineers do not have a clearly defined accountability forum and that they rely on engineering ethics and codes of conduct. However, these codes of conduct are often not robustly enough institutionalized to be regarded as a good regulative framework. Therefore, engineers use methods such as the Value-Sensitive Design and Constructive Technology Assessment as proxies for accountability forums. The need to develop and use these proxies for engineering practices reveals that a governance perspective on responsibility and control lacks robust institutionalized frameworks. The insufficiency of traditional notions of control to make sense of the human control over Autonomous Weapon Systems required to ground accountability, has led to the introduction of the notion of Meaningful Human Control in the political debate on Autonomous Weapon Systems. However, a common definition of this notion has been lacking in practice for a long time (Ekelhof, 2019). Some scholars have been working on defining and operationalizing Meaningful Human Control over the past years. Horowitz and Scharre (2015, pp. 14-15) were one of the first to list three essential components for Meaningful Human Control: ‘(1) Human operators are making informed, conscious decisions about the use of weapons. (2) Human operators have sufficient information to ensure the lawfulness of the action they are taking, given what they know about the target, the weapon, and the context for action. (3) The weapon is designed and tested, and human operators are properly trained, to ensure effective control over the use of the weapon.’ However, these three components do not apply to Autonomous Weapon Systems alone, but apply to the use of weapons in general. Ekelhof (2019) states that the relationship between the human operator and Autonomous Weapon System is used as reference to define Meaningful Human Control, but this is still a general and abstract definition of this notion. Moreover, this notion of control has a very operational view and is strongly, if not exclusively, focused on the relation between one human controller and one technical system, and tries to identify the different conditions under which that controller may be able to effectively interact with the system. We may call this a narrow notion of Meaningful Human Control, insofar as the broader perspective of governance of control, organisational aspects, values and norms does not seem to be incorporated.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw