'Human in the loop' may become an actual job title

Under a draft occupational profile circulating between labour specialists and disarmament researchers, the phrase human in the loop — today a negotiating term in arms control — would become an occupation with a classification code, a pay band and a rota. The document is explicitly a thought experiment. It is already being asked for in a format that can be pasted into a job advertisement.

The logic behind it is procedural rather than sinister. If a binding instrument required meaningful human control over the use of force by an autonomous system, that control would have to be exercised by somebody, somewhere, according to a schedule. The draft does the unglamorous work of describing who. An operator would review machine-generated recommendations and either confirm or withhold them, within a window the profile sets at a few seconds, across a shift the profile sets at eight hours with breaks.

Required competencies include sustained attention, tolerance of repetitive stimulus and “the ability to disagree with a system that is usually right”. The last one appears under soft skills, between teamwork and time management.

A federation of public-sector unions would raise the obvious question first. If the operator is the human control the treaty demands, the operator is also the place the responsibility comes to rest — and the profile, in its current form, would pair a junior grade with an unlimited one. The drafters offer a compromise they call shared attributable judgement, distributing responsibility across the operator, a supervising officer and the procurement authority that bought the system. One union representative would describe it as three names on a form, of whom exactly one can be suspended by Friday.

“The position is not a rubber stamp,” a spokesperson for the drafting group would say. “The operator may decline any recommendation at any time, and is not required to give a reason.” Asked how often comparable civilian operators decline, the spokesperson would offer to provide figures at a later date.

This is where the profile becomes uncomfortable, because human-factors research has been describing the difficulty for decades. People supervising an automated system that is right most of the time tend to accept what it proposes and to miss the evidence pointing the other way, and the effect grows stronger under time pressure and heavy workload rather than weaker. A treaty clause can require a human decision. It cannot require the human to be a different animal at four in the morning in the seventh hour of a shift.

The draft would also create the first job in which meets expectations means the employee agreed with the machine almost every time, and requires improvement means the same sentence read from the other end. Nobody has adopted it, nobody has costed it, and the salary band is blank. The budget line it would eventually sit under is already named, in every organisation that will one day have one. It is called compliance.