The law of stretched systems in action: exploiting robots

• Authors: David D. Woods
• Venue: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction
• Year: 2006

Robotic systems represent new capabilities that justifiably excite technologists and problem holders in many areas. But what affordances do the new capabilities represent and how will problem holders and practitioners exploit these capabilities as they struggle to meet performance demands and resource pressures? Discussions of the impact of new robotic technology typically mistake new capabilities for affordances in use. The dominate note is that robots as autonomous agents will revolutionize human activity. This is a fundamental oversimplification (see Feltovich et al., 2001) as past research has shown that advances in autonomy (an intrinsic capability) have turned out to demand advances in support for coordinated activity (extrinsic affordances). The Law of Stretched Systems captures the co-adaptive dynamic that human leaders under pressure for higher and more efficient levels of performance will exploit new capabilities to demand more complex forms of work (Woods and Dekker, 2000; Woods and Hollnagel, 2006). This law provides a guide to use past findings on the reverberations of technology change to project how effective leaders and operators will exploit the capabilities of future robotic systems. When one applies the Law of Stretched Systems to new robotic capabilities for demanding work settings, one begins to see new stories about how problem holders work with and through robotic systems to accomplish goals. These are not stories about machine autonomy and the substitution myth. Rather, the new capabilities trigger the exploration of new story lines about future operations that concern: how to coordinate activities over wider ranges, how to expand our perception and action over larger spans through remote devices, and how to project our intent into distant situations to achieve our goals..