Ten Challenges for Making Automation a "Team Player" in Joint Human-Agent Activity

puting that we have developed individually and jointly over the years, and is adapted from a more comprehensive examination of common ground and coordination. 1 We define joint activity as an extended set of actions that are carried out by an ensemble of people who are coordinating with each other. 1,2 Joint activity involves at least four basic requirements. All the participants must • Enter into an agreement, which we call a Basic Compact, that the participants intend to work together • Be mutually predictable in their actions • Be mutually directable • Maintain common ground The Basic Compact To carry out joint activity, each party effectively enters into a Basic Compact—an agreement (often tacit) to facilitate coordination, work toward shared goals, and prevent breakdowns in team coordination. This Compact involves a commitment to some degree of goal alignment. Typically this entails one or more participants relaxing their own shorter-term goals in order to permit more global and long-term team goals to be addressed. These longer-term goals might be shared (for example, a relay team) or individual (such as highway drivers wanting to ensure their own safe journeys). The Basic Compact is not a once-and-for-all prerequisite to be satisfied but rather has to be continuously reinforced or renewed. It includes an expectation that the parties will repair faulty mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions when these are detected. Part of achieving coordination is investing in those actions that enhance the Compact's integrity as well as being sensitive to and counteracting those factors that could degrade it. For example, remaining in a Compact during a conversation manifests in the process of accepting turns, relating understandings, detecting the need for and engaging in repair, displaying a posture of interest, and the like. When these sorts of things aren't happening, we might infer that one or more of the parties isn't wholeheartedly engaged. The Compact requires that if one party intends to drop out of the joint activity, he or she must signal this to the other parties. Breakdowns occur when a party abandons the team without clearly signaling his or her intentions to others. While in traffic, drivers might have defensible motives for rejecting a Compact about following the rules of the road, as when they're responding to an emergency by rushing someone to the nearest hospital. At such times, drivers might turn on their emergency blinkers to signal to other drivers that …