In Wright, P., Dekker, S and Warren, C.P. Confronting reality: Proceedings of EACE-10, the 10th European conference on cognitive ergonomics. Linkoping Sweden. ISBN 91-7219-828-1. Pp. 113-128.
It is becoming popular to view automated systems as 'team players' in distributed co-operative work environments. This paper scrutinises such a viewpoint in detail, focusing on the implications of being a team player and whether today's automation is really capable of achieving this type of status. We view agent interaction as more than information transfer. True teamplay implies co-operation and active collaboration. We use work concerned with the description of human-human collaboration to highlight the importance of mutuality in true collaboration. A recent aircraft accident in which human-automation interaction was causally implicated is used to illustrate how today's automation falls short of achieving true participation and by implication fails as a team player. Our aim in particular is to draw attention to the limits of the 'automation as team player' metaphor as a goal of automation design. The key question designers should be asking is not ?how can we make automation a better teamplayer ?', but 'how can we make automation compatible with the teamplaying context in which it will be deployed?'.