  In recent years, many sectors have experienced significant progress in
automation, associated with the growing advances in artificial intelligence and
machine learning. There are already automated robotic weapons, which are able
to evaluate and engage with targets on their own, and there are already
autonomous vehicles that do not need a human driver. It is argued that the use
of increasingly autonomous systems (AS) should be guided by the policy of human
control, according to which humans should execute a certain significant level
of judgment over AS. While in the military sector there is a fear that AS could
mean that humans lose control over life and death decisions, in the
transportation domain, on the contrary, there is a strongly held view that
autonomy could bring significant operational benefits by removing the need for
a human driver. This article explores the notion of human control in the United
States in the two domains of defense and transportation. The operationalization
of emerging policies of human control results in the typology of direct and
indirect human controls exercised over the use of AS. The typology helps to
steer the debate away from the linguistic complexities of the term autonomy. It
identifies instead where human factors are undergoing important changes and
ultimately informs about more detailed rules and standards formulation, which
differ across domains, applications, and sectors.
