Correction to: Ensuring the exercise of human agency in AI-based military systems: concerns across the lifecycle

Over the past years, the number of governance initiatives on applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the military domain has expanded. As actors across the governance landscape turn towards implementing these initiatives, principles will need to be spelled out in practical terms, marking a decisive phase in the governance process. This includes the exercise of human agency in the context of using AI-based systems in the military domain. This paper considers what the notion of exercising human agency means across the lifecycle of AI systems. A lifecycle framework acknowledges that ensuring a qualitatively high exercise of human agency in AI-based systems cannot rely exclusively on the tail-end of the targeting decision-making process. Rather, it needs to be built into the lifecycle of AI-based systems from before the potential development of such systems all the way to post-use review. Each of the lifecycle stages raises manifold questions and challenges that various stakeholders need to address in their efforts to sustain and strengthen human agency. The paper highlights twelve key technical, ethical, legal, and strategic concerns across different stages of the lifecycle. These sets of concerns illustrate the value of developing more fine-grained thinking around applied lifecycle models. We conclude that ensuring the exercise of human agency in the use of AI-based systems in military contexts will require careful and reflective decision-making around questions and challenges among the stakeholders involved.

Explorations of the structure-agency dialectic as a tool for framing equity in science education

Globalization as a development model is generally now regarded as the sine qua non for development policy with little room for alternative theorising on capitalist development. Neoliberalism, as the supporting ideology of globalization, inflates the social significance of the market and mystifies human relations. It therefore, gives a distorted view of reality, how people are living and their agential capacity to improve their lives. Critical to human agency is it the way it is exercised - does it reduce inequality or does it exacerbate inequality? How is this human agency exercised by different groups of people? The paper provides a discussion on the relationship between neoliberal ideology, globalization and the exercise of human agency. It examines the social reality of globalization and neoliberalism and how this affects the agential capacity of human beings to direct their development, as individuals, communities and as nations.

The relationship between the regularity of historic development and human agency varies with the formation and development of regularity: regularity emerges from the exercise of agency and then both constrains and guides the latter; the exercise of the agency determines the formation of regularity, and after its formation is constrained but actively uses it and strives for the initiative. The two are separated by their fundamental nature but are united twice by the combined action of human beings and the interaction of 'constraint' and 'use and strive for initiative'.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has vastly reshaped user experiences on social media. AI-powered social media use and its outcomes largely depend on how users collaborate with AI that exercises agency. Through in-depth interviews with TikTok users, this study investigates how users collaborate with AI when using AI-powered social media and how such dynamics shape user engagement. We found that TikTok users are receptive to personalized experiences enabled by machine agency. However, by influencing each other, user agency and machine agency also led to user–AI synergy. Users deliberately influence content curation algorithms to make them cater more precisely to their needs; AI also facilitates users’ content creation and networking. Such AI–user collaboration on TikTok significantly influences medium engagement and social-interactive engagement. These findings advance our understanding of the dynamics between human agency and machine agency and, thus, how AI transforms user experiences on social media.

Social cognitive theory adopts an agentic perspective in which individuals are producers of experiences and shapers of events. Among the mechanisms of human agency, none is more focal or pervading than the belief of personal efficacy. This core belief is the foundation of human agency. Unless people believe that they can produce desired effects and forestall undesired ones by their actions, they have little incentive to act. The growing interdependence of human functioning is placing a premium on the exercise of collective agency through shared beliefs in the power to produce effects by collective action. The present article analyzes the nature of perceived collective efficacy and its centrality in how people live their lives. Perceived collective efficacy fosters groups' motivational commitment to their missions, resilience to adversity, and performance accomplishments.

The objective of this chapter is to introduce improvisational self-directed learning as a transformative approach to developing effective adult learning. Improvisational self-directed learning is a method that encourages individuals to leverage their psychological capital and self-directedness through the exercise of human agency. It is common practice to focus on content-related learning objectives while designing educational curriculum and programs. Less routine is a simultaneous focus on the psychological state, human agency, and self-directedness of those involved in the entire process. The type of transformative learning communities necessary for effective 21st century adult education require ongoing faculty and student development. This chapter provides a theoretical framework based on human agency, psychological capital, improvisational behavior, and adult learning. The use of improvisation is presented as a technique for leveraging psychological capital, human agency, and self-directedness to create thriving 21st century learning communities.

Online learning applications are typically introduced with expectations that they will be used to improve learning and work practices, yet they often fall short of expectations following implementation. Numerous empirical studies have reported unintended use (and nonuse) of new IT applications, providing initial support for practice-based research for viewing emergent changes in work practices. Human agency is a core concept in theories of practice, which seek to explain how recurring patterns of action develop in social contexts such as work settings. However, current applications of theories of practice do not provide satisfactory explanations for the reasons underlying changes in work practice. In this study, we investigate changes in learning and work practices associated with the implementation of an online learning system in a Taiwanese hospital. We apply a temporal theory of human agency that disaggregates agency into elements reflecting actors' orientations to the past, present, and future. We use this theory to address the following research question: why do learning and work practices change following the implementation of online learning? The case study reveals that actors face pressures to respond to the attractions of new ways of learning while preserving traditional work practices. In addition, technological features and social structures constrain the exercise of human agency. As a result, use of the online learning system declined in the period following implementation. Our analysis adds explanatory power to the practice perspective by incorporating human agency, technological constraints, and structural conditions that affect practice.

Even though the notion of “disability” has received ongoing critical scrutiny and re-imagination within the field of disability studies, the concept of law has often been taken for granted. Although people with intellectual disabilities figure as subjects of legal discourse, seldom are they presented as participants in it. I argue that this owes to assumptions about law that fail to recognize the diversity of ways human beings exercise agency and experience normativity. I believe that research on the relationship between “law, religion, and disability” stands to benefit from imagining law as an interactional, symbolically plural human endeavour. I build on the theoretical framework of critical legal pluralism to highlight how law arises through interaction – informally and implicitly, as well as officially and explicitly. Drawing on fieldwork I carried out in L’Arche Montréal – a faith-based community serving people with intellectual disabilities – I illustrate the creative role that people with intellectual disabilities play in the construction of legal normativity. As important as it is to ask how law affects people with intellectual disabilities, is to ask about how their actions also shape law. When it comes to asking what law means for some of the most vulnerable members of society, it is not just a question of seeing how it may function either to prevent or to remedy harm. It is also a matter of seeing the ways in which law may facilitate (while being forged by) the cultivation of relationships and the liberation of human potential.

While much ink has been poured on the phenomena of human (and indeed, avian) superstition, most of the attention has been focused on a process seen as somehow pejorative, as negative – as correlated with feelings of inadequacy or powerlessness, or with faulty understanding of science can causality. This paper proposes a different thesis: that there are some forms of superstition which actually reflect an exercise of human agency, of exertion of control over a universe which is perceived as capricious, rather than as absolutely predetermined or fated. To this end, a new system of classifying superstitious beliefs and practices is proposed, which delineates not on the purported outcome of the action but on the level of human agency involved. Many superstitions are based on the ultimately hopeful premise that willed human action can have an effect on the future.

Honorary President's Address - Allocution du President honoraire Abstract Societies today are undergoing drastic social, informational, and technological changes. The revolutionary advances in electronic technologies and globalization are transforming the nature, reach, speed, and loci of human influence. These rapidly evolving realities place increasing demands on the exercise of personal and collective agency to shape personal destinies and the national life of societies. There is growing unease about progressive divestiture of different aspects of psychology to biology and subpersonal cognitive science. It is feared that as we give away more and more psychology to disciplines lower on the food chain, there will be no core psychological discipline left. Contrary to divestitive oracles, psychology is the integrative discipline best suited to advance understanding of human adaptation and change. It is the discipline that uniquely encompasses the complex interplay between intrapersonal, biological, interpersonal, and sociostructural determinants of human functioning. With the growing primacy of human agency in virtually all spheres of life, the field of psychology should be articulating a broad vision of human beings not a reductive fragmentary one. The present address analyzes human adaptation and change from an agentic perspective and documents the growing primacy of personal and collective agency in this era of globalization. The capacity to exercise some measure of control over the nature and quality of one's life is the essence of humanness. Human agency is characterized by a number of core features. These include intentionality for shaping future plans and courses of action, temporal extension of agency through forethought, self-regulation of motivation, affect, and action through self-influence, and self-reflectiveness concerning one's functioning and the meaning and purpose of one's life (Bandura, 1999a, 2001). These core features of self-directedness enable humans to play a part in their own development, adaptation, and self-- renewal. PARADIGM SHIFTS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIZING In its brief history, psychology has undergone wrenching paradigm shifts. The current theoretical ferment will determine the very nature of our discipline, not only the paradigms that subserve it. Over the years, the core metaphors of our theories have changed but the theories grant humans little, if any, agentic capabilities. Much of the early psychological theorizing was founded on behaviouristic principles. It embraced an input-output model linked by an internal conduit that makes behaviour possible but exerts no influence of its own. Human behaviour was shaped and controlled automatically and mechanically by environmental stimuli. This line of theorizing was put out of vogue by the advent of the computer. It likened the mind to a linear computational system operating through a central processor. This model filled the internal conduit with a lot of representational and computational operations created by smart and inventive thinkers. The linear model was, in turn, supplanted by more dynamically organized computational models that perform multiple operations simultaneously and inter-actively to mimic better how the human brain works. Sensory organs deliver up information to a neural network acting as the mental machinery. The network does the construing, planning, motivating, and regulating nonconsciously. Although the mindless organism became a more cognitive one, it was still devoid of consciousness and agentic capabilities. It is not people, but their subpersonal parts that are orchestrating the courses of action. The personal level involves phenomenal consciousness and the purposive use of information and self-regulative means to make desired things happen. Consciousness is the very substance of mental life. It not only makes life personally manageable but worth living. …

Digital spaces offer expanded economic and social opportunities to exercise human agency. With increasing numbers of people falling into poverty, it is those same people at the margins who hold the key to global recovery. The term human digital development refers to the exercise of human agency using ICTs, in particular human interactions in cyberspace that offer new ways in which people may lead the lives they choose to live. Being healthy is central for an individual’s capabilities and freedoms to bring about improvements in their lives. The role for human digital development in global health lies in the ways in which artificial intelligent applications are used to support people, their providers and institutions operating in low-resource environments. In this way, digital health enables the use of artificially intelligent technologies to achieve improved health outcomes. Investments in human digital development can create positive cycles of prosperity by spurring economic growth.

INTRODUCTION. Girls, boys and adolescents are entitled to participation rights and citizenship status. To this should be added the recognition of their human agency, given that it is from their condition as agents that they will be able to exercise their rights autonomously. This study aims to identify the elements that enable children and adolescents to develop a sense of human agency, comparing their accounts of their participatory experiences in educational centres, leisure time and youth centres, family environments, digital environments and Childhood and Adolescence Councils. METHOD. Using a qualitative meta-synthesis analysis design (QMS), the data collected in three studies with a common research focus are analysed to reinterpret them and generate new knowledge. The QMS integrates the accounts of 150 children and adolescents between the ages of 8 and 18 years of age collected in 17 group discussions. The analysis is carried out in four phases: familiarisation, establishment of relationships, translation and synthesis of units and categories, and synthesis of results through narrative descriptions. RESULTS. Two thematic units are identified, the enabling context and the agentic qualities, together with their corresponding categories. Enabling contexts favour the development of a sense of agency and the exercise of human agency by children and adolescents. Agentic qualities are the attributes that children and adolescents express with respect to their sense of agency. DISCUSSION. There are significant differences in the development of children’s and adolescents’ sense of agency depending on the context and the roles in which the participatory experiences unfold, with those that take place as democratic citizenship being the ones that genuinely favour it. The identified elements provide aframework for creating enabling contexts that allow the recognition and development of childrenand adolescents’ sense of human agency through genuine democratic participation.

My aim in this paper is to highlight and expand upon what I see as a central theme in Roderick Macdonald’s scholarship. I call this the imperative of “inspiring governance”. I begin by discussing how Macdonald frames the governance endeavour. Next I highlight the distinctive, human agency-focused manner in which Macdonald conceives “governance through law”. Next, I discuss the paradoxical relationship between “governance through law” and the “exercise of human agency” that Macdonald’s work exposes. I argue that Macdonald’s endeavour to foreground the problem of facilitating human agency in his legal research reveals a “jurisprudence of hope”, whereby pursuing one’s life in the law may be understood as a way of striving for justice in the world.

Developments in machine learning prompt questions about algorithmic decision-support systems (DSS) in warfare. This article explores how the use of these technologies impact practices of legal reasoning in military targeting. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) requires assessment of the proportionality of attacks, namely whether the expected incidental harm to civilians and civilian objects is excessive compared to the anticipated military advantage. Situating human agency in this practice of legal reasoning, this article considers whether the interaction between commanders (and the teams that support them) and algorithmic DSS for proportionality assessments alter this practice and displace the exercise of human agency. As DSS that purport to provide recommendations on proportionality generate output in a manner substantively different to proportionality assessments, these systems are not fit for purpose. Moreover, legal reasoning may be shaped by DSS that provide intelligence information due to the limits of reliability, biases and opacity characteristic of machine learning.