Some recent work on Meaningful Human Control

Three recent papers that develop or apply our approach of meaningful human control as reason-responsiveness.

In addition to the many contributions included in our edited Research Handbook (Elgar 2024), I would like to mention three recent papers from colleagues:

1. Responsibly Engineering Control by Sebastian Köhler, Giulio Mecacci and Herman Veluwenkamp, American Philosophical Quarterly (2025) 62 (2): 113–132.
   

Giulio Mecacci, who has strongly contributed to the original development of our framework, join forces with two other sharp philosophers to explain one fundamental conceptual shift made possible by framing control as reason-responsiveness and presents this shift as an important example of “conceptual engineering”. Here is the abstract:

A number of concerns have been recently raised regarding the possibility of human agents to effectively maintain control over intelligent and (partially) autonomous artificial systems. These issues have been deemed to raise “responsibility gaps.” To address these gaps, several scholars and other public and private stakeholders converged towards the idea that, in deploying intelligent technology, a meaningful form of human control (MHC) should be at all times exercised over autonomous intelligent technology. One of the main criticisms of the general idea of MHC is that it could be inherently problematic to have high degrees of control and high degrees of autonomy at the same time, as the two dimensions appear to be inversely related. Several ways to respond to this argument and deal with the dilemma between control and autonomy have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we further contribute to the philosophical effort to overcome the trade-off between automation and human control, and to open up some space for moral responsibility. We will use the instrument of conceptual engineering to investigate whether and to what extent removing the element of direct causal intervention from the concept of control can preserve the main functions of that concept, specifically focusing on the extent it can act as a foundation of moral responsibility. We show that at least one philosophical account of MHC is indeed a conceptually viable theory to absolve the fundamental functions of control, even in the context of completely autonomous artificial systems.

2. Principles and Framework for the Operationalisation of Meaningful Human Control Over Autonomous Systems by Simeon Calvert, Sci Eng Ethics 31, 27 (2025).

Simeon is one of the biggest experts on MHC as reason-responsiveness from an engineering perspective. In this ambitious paper he proposes a generic framework for the operationalization of MHC grounded in a huge literature research and his deep knowledge of the topic. Here is the abstract:

With a plethora of different seemingly diverging expansions for the use of Meaningful Human Control (MHC) in practice, this paper proposes an alignment for the operationalization of MHC for autonomous systems by proposing operational principles for MHC and introducing a generic framework for its application. The increasing integration of autonomous systems in various domains emphasizes a critical need to maintain human control to ensure responsible safety, accountability, and ethical operation of these systems. The concept of MHC offers an ideal framework for the design and evaluation of human control over autonomous systems while considering human and technology capabilities. Through the conceptual synthesis of existing literature and investigation across various domains and related concepts, principles for the operationalization of MHC are set out to provide tangible guidelines for researchers and practitioners aiming to implement MHC in their systems. The proposed framework dissects generic components of systems and their subsystems aligned with different agents, stakeholders, and processes at different levels of proximity to an autonomous technology. The framework is domain-agnostic, emphasizing the universal applicability of the MHC principles irrespective of the technological context, paving the way for safer and more responsible autonomous systems.

3. Is Meaningful Human Control Over Personalised AI Assistants Possible? Ethical Design Requirements for The New Generation of Artificially Intelligent Agents by Sietze Kuilman, Sven Nyholm, Stefan Buijsman & Luciano Cavalcante Siebert, Philos. Technol. 38, 148 (2025)

Sietze Kuilman is a second-generation scholar on MHC and did his PhD under the supervision of Luciano Siebert, another big expert on MHC from the engineering side. Sietze co-authors this paper with his other TU Delft supervisor Stefan Buijsman and the fantastic Sven Nyholm to reflect on the challenges of applying the MHC framework to the new generation of Personalised AI Assistants. Here is the abstract:

Recently, several large tech companies have pushed the notion of AI assistants into the public debate. These envisioned agents are intended to far outshine current systems, as they are intended to be able to manage our affairs as if they are personal assistants. In turn, this ought to give users a leg up, as one prominent tech exec has put it. However, it remains to be seen how these Personal AI Assistants (PAIAs) are implemented, and critical reflection on how and whether they can be implemented in a responsible way is needed. Currently, such agents are undertheorized and this may cause us to misunderstand their value and capacity. In this paper, we explore and critique the potential for responsible implementation by considering some design requirements based on the notion of meaningful human control. If we desire to have control over such assistants, then we need to be able to do so meaningfully and effectively. In looking at the design requirements, we run into the issue that their broad and differing capacities make any kind of design requirements hard because there are simply no standards to which we can measure PAIAs. Furthermore, it seems that the implementation of these assistants will be a matter of trade-offs both in capacities and in values, which will likely lead to enhancement for some rather than an improvement for all.