How do you Command an Army of Intelligent Things?

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenges and considerations of managing and commanding a future workforce composed of both humans and intelligent things, especially in military contexts, focusing on decision-making, trust, and organizational issues.

Contribution

It analyzes the emerging organizational and managerial challenges of human-thing teams in warfare, proposing considerations for effective command and control of intelligent entities.

Findings

Humans and intelligent things face trust and explanation challenges.

Effective C2 requires understanding of personal and organizational dynamics.

Managing mixed teams involves addressing unpredictability and out-of-the-box thinking.

Abstract

Within a decade, probably less, we will need to find ways to work effectively with ever growing numbers of intelligent things, including robots and intelligent agents. The networked workforce of the near future will thus consist of not only interconnected and interdependent humans but also of intelligent things. This raises a number of challenging issues, none more compelling and urgent than finding an answer to the question "How to manage this new organizational form?" We consider these issues in a particularly challenging domain of human endeavor -- warfare. Command and Control (C2) is the term applied to management or governance of military organizations and endeavors. We consider how human and other intelligent entities can best contribute to ensuring that the decision makers, whether human or machine, have the information they require and make good use of this information to accomplish C2 functions. Commanders or managers of mixed human-thing organizations will face several challenges that the discussion above has highlighted. Things are challenged in a number of areas and will need humans to provide these capabilities. These include their ability to explain, build trust, bond, understand personal agendas, emotions, politics, and negotiate. Things and people both to some extent have difficulty anticipating and coping with the unusual and unexpected and to think of out-of-the-box solutions.