Accountability and responsibility are key concepts in the academic and societal debate on Autonomous Weapon Systems, but these notions are often used as high-level overarching constructs and are not operationalised to be useful in practice. “Meaningful Human Control” is often mentioned as a requirement for the deployment of Autonomous Weapon Systems, but a common definition of what this notion means in practice, and a clear understanding of its relation with responsibility and accountability is also lacking. In this paper, we present a definition of these concepts and describe the relations between accountability, responsibility, control and oversight in order to show how these notions are distinct but also connected. We focus on accountability as a particular form of responsibility—the obligation to explain one’s action to a forum—and we present three ways in which the introduction of Autonomous Weapon Systems may create “accountability gaps”. We propose a Framework for Comprehensive Human Oversight based on an engineering, socio-technical and governance perspective on control. Our main claim is that combining the control mechanisms at technical, socio-technical and governance levels will lead to comprehensive human oversight over Autonomous Weapon Systems which may ensure solid controllability and accountability for the behaviour of Autonomous Weapon Systems. Finally, we give an overview of the military control instruments that are currently used in the Netherlands and show the applicability of the comprehensive human oversight Framework to Autonomous Weapon Systems. Our analysis reveals two main gaps in the current control mechanisms as applied to Autonomous Weapon Systems. We have identified three first options as future work for the design of a control mechanism, one in the technological layer, one in the socio-technical layer and one the governance layer, in order to achieve comprehensive human oversight and ensure accountability over Autonomous Weapon Systems.

中文翻译：

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对自主武器系统的问责和控制：全面人类监督的框架

问责制和责任是关于自主武器系统的学术和社会辩论中的关键概念，但这些概念通常被用作高层次的总体结构，并没有在实践中发挥作用。“有意义的人类控制”经常被认为是部署自主武器系统的必要条件，但对于这一概念在实践中的含义的共同定义，以及对其与责任和问责制的关系的明确理解也缺乏。在本文中，我们提出了这些概念的定义，并描述了问责制、责任、控制和监督之间的关系，以展示这些概念如何不同但又相互关联。我们将问责制作为一种特殊的责任形式——向论坛解释自己的行为的义务——并且我们提出了引入自主武器系统可能造​​成“问责制差距”的三种方式。我们提出了一个基于控制的工程、社会技术和治理视角的综合人类监督框架。我们的主要主张是，将技术、社会技术和治理层面的控制机制结合起来，将导致对自主武器系统的全面人工监督，这可以确保自主武器系统行为的可靠可控性和问责制。最后，我们概述了目前在荷兰使用的军事控制仪器，并展示了全面的人类监督框架对自主武器系统的适用性。我们的分析揭示了当前应用于自主武器系统的控制机制中的两个主要差距。我们已经确定了三个最初的选择作为控制机制设计的未来工作，一个在技术层，一个在社会技术层，一个在治理层，以实现全面的人类监督并确保对自主武器系统的问责.