Human Commands Research Articles

"Shall Not the Judge of the Earth Deal Justly?": Accountability, Compassion, and Judicial Authority in the Biblical Story of Sodom and Gomorrah

In his article, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, Arthur Leff laments the death of God in jurisprudence. According to Leff, divine commands are the only source of law that is ultimately justifiable. “[T]he pronouncements of an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinitely good being are [by definition] always true and effectual,” he writes. “God's will is binding because it is His will that it be.” In the modern era, however, God's authority has been overthrown by our desire to decide for ourselves the standards of right and wrong. The absence of God, observes Leff, deprives us of a solid foundation for our legal system. Without instruction from above, laws are no more than human commands, based merely on human will: “Whenever we set out to find ‘the law,’ we are able to locate nothing more attractive, or more final, than ourselves.” Leff's recognition that behind the rule of law lies not the benevolence of divine guidance but the capriciousness of human will results in a jurisprudential despair that leads him to cry out ironically at the end of his essay, “God help us.”

Moving Personal Robots in Real-Time Using Primitive Motions

Personal robotics is a new and attractive use of robotic technologies. In this paper we study one of its important topics—real-time motion planning of personal robots. We propose to use primitive motions and their combinations to make this possible. The primitive motion has a unified pattern and is borrowed from the motion pattern of human hands observed by previous researchers. The pattern is simple yet powerful and can form complex trajectories. A reflexive motion control scheme is proposed to activate appropriate primitive motions for a desired motion. As a result, real-time motion planning of personal robots becomes possible by using discrete and sparse human commands. Experiments results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Modeling and constraining human interactions in shared control utilizing a discrete event framework

Human integration is essential in systems where autonomous control alone would not be successful. In this paper, we present a framework for integrating a human supervisor into an otherwise autonomous control system. To facilitate integration, discrete event systems theory is adopted to model human interactions. It is via this interaction model that human commands can be combined with commands from an automated control system. For control synthesis, a method based on constraints is being used to generate velocity commands from the autonomous task level controller. The constraints are also utilized to limit human input so that erroneous human input is minimized. The methods are demonstrated by experiments.

Successful visual human-computer interaction is undecidable

We propose a model of visual interactive computing and define a family of visual languages which abstract some of its features. We prove that the problem whether or not successful communications exist is not decidable. (A human-computer communication by means of a visual language is successful when all human commands, in the form of pictures composed of icons, are correctly interpreted and answered by the computer.) The proof makes use of a codification of the Post Correspondence Problem by means of icons and pictures. This result warns about possible limitations of a purely algorithmic treatment of interactive computing via visual languages.

Co-evolution of a multiple autonomous robot system and its working environment via intelligent local information storage

This paper proposes a new strategy of evolution and adaptation of a population of multiple autonomous mobile robots to make multi-robot systems more flexible and robust against unpredictable environmental conditions and human operator's capricious commands, and to overcome the limitation of biologically inspired techniques which need a certain degree of redundancy and diversity. The important idea of the strategy is to utilize the advantageous parallelism of the multi-robot system and immobile but portable devices (data carriers) for information storage and management. A device named IDC (Intelligent Data Carrier) is developed with a unique mushroom-like structure to be easily handled by a forklift mechanism which can be mounted on actual mobile robots. The handling method of the IDC unit, which should be essential to realization of the proposed strategy, is examined through the experiment using an omni-directional mobile robot, and the robot succeeded in placing the unit at an appropriate location. With the demonstrated handling technique, the robots can adapt and evolve as a population by accessing locally available information which is stored and processed in the IDC unit.

Communication and its constraints on the structure of organisations

Control of organisations is one of the principal concerns of management. Day to day control is frequently mainly achieved by oral or verbal communication. It is suggested that loss or distortion of information during its passage through a chain of command can impose a major constraint on the effectiveness of an organisation. An experiment was devised in order to determine the information loss and distortion likely to occur when verbal information is passed through a series of people. It was found necessary to develop a method of coding and classifying verbal and written information before the data could be analysed. Some 21 different types of verbal information ‘bit’ were eventually isolated. It was found that there were some unexpected effects in the information loss process, and that distortions could frequently take place which created an exactly opposite effect to that required. It was also noted that critical loss levels existed, and that the believed ability to act on the information was related to this level. The results are described in the paper and losses and distortions are quantified so that the reliability of the human command system can be evaluated. The losses are then related to the deduced and observed limitations of the size and structure organisations.

Sensory feedback does not cause selective adaptation of human "command neurons".

It has been proposed that body movements are partly controlled by a neural hierarchy, with cells at successively higher levels controlling increasing numbers of muscles engaged in functionally equivalent responses. In addition to physiological support for the hypothesis, obtained from infrahuman species, evidence from human subjects has been obtained in the form of negative transfer between successive similar responses. This negative transfer has been attributed to selective adaptation of "command neurons" in the human motor system. The present experiment found no evidence for negative (or positive) transfer between passive and active movements, suggesting that selective adaptation of human command neurons is caused by efference rather than afference.

The Function of Consciousness on Matter

Note: This is an article I wrote in 1953. In recent years there have been new developments in the "debate between man and machines." Machines can "understand" what man says and do things according to human commands, facts that I did not know possible at the time. However, I believe that the ideas contained in this article concerning the views that only physical or material forces can effect changes in the state of matter and that there are two kinds of matter do not need to be revised because of these developments. — Author.

Systems, Purposes, and the Watergate

LET ME identify myself, in order to identify with you. I wandered some years ago into a profession for which, because it did not seem to have a name, I have tried to popularize the term public executive. My kind of work is to bring people together in organizations to make something different happen, in the public interest. And you, the scientists of management, have enormously helped us practitioners of management. You have done your best to make a science out of this most occult, psychic, and humane of all the professions. You have forced the public executives -among them many of you-to count whatever could be counted. And that was good, even if your efforts did persuade some executives, and legislators, that what can be programmed into a computer must be more important than what cannot. Above all, you made the way people work together an honored topic of systematic study. Through the efforts of this Society, among a very few others, the analysis of organization systems is now a respectable way to spend our time and the taxpayer's money. But I am here to tell you what you know already too well: it is not good enough. To have learned how to think in systems-rather than in pyramids, boxes, budgets, flow charts, balance sheets, or PERT diagrams-has certainly advanced our capacity to cope with physical reality, and to plan and carry into action at human command operations of almost unimaginable complexity. But the question I want to raise with you is whether systems thinking may have retarded our capacity to cope with ethical issues, to think systematically about values, to man the switchboards where purpose is plugged into power.

Systems, Purposes, and the Watergate

AboutSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Go to Section HomeOperations ResearchVol. 21, No. 5 Systems, Purposes, and the WatergateHarlan ClevelandHarlan ClevelandPublished Online:1 Oct 1973https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.21.5.1019 Back to Top Next FiguresReferencesRelatedInformationCited ByNotes, ideas & techniques new vistas of management scienceComputers & Operations Research, Vol. 2, No. 2 Volume 21, Issue 5September-October 1973Pages 1019-1175 Article Information Metrics Downloaded 0 times in the past 12 months Information Published Online:October 01, 1973 © 1973 INFORMSCite asHarlan Cleveland, (1973) Systems, Purposes, and the Watergate. Operations Research 21(5):1019-1023. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.21.5.1019 PDF download

American public health association: New Drugs, Equipment, Human Relations Programs Command Major Interest at Meeting

american public health association: New Drugs, Equipment, Human Relations Programs Command Major Interest at Meeting

Common Good and Common Action

Anarchy is rarely or never upheld with consistency. In the pedagogy of Rousseau, there is a set purpose to let the child be guided by natural necessity rather than by human command, and to let him learn from the experience of physical facts rather than by obedience. “Keep the child solely dependent on things; you will have followed the order of Nature in the process of his upbringing. Never oppose to his unreasonable wishes any but physical obstacles or punishments resulting from the actions themselves — he will remember these punishments in similar situations. It is enough to prevent him from doing evil without forbidding him to do it …” (Emile, II). Remarkably, the theory that the method of authority is a poor substitute for the pedagogical power of nature has been accepted, in varying degree of enthusiasm or reluctance, by most schools of pedagogy and has demonstrated lasting power. Yet the authority of parents and tutors is present throughout pedagogical theories, even when it is passed over in silence. Childhood is the domain where the suppression of all authority is obviously impossible. The most radical constructs of anarchy, as soon as they rise above the level of idle rhetoric, admit of qualifications so far at least as the immature part of mankind is concerned. Anti-authoritarian theorists, with few exceptions if any, do not mean that authority should disappear or that it can ever cease to be a factor of major importance in human affairs. What thinkers opposed to authority generally mean is that authority can never be vindicated except by such deficiencies as are found in children, in the feeble-minded, the emotionally unstable, the criminally inclined, the illiterate, and the historically primitive.