AEGIS and AUTOSHIP presented a joint conference paper at ESREL 2023, in Southampton, last week: A Critisicm of Proposed Levels of Autonomy for MASS.
The paper argues that autonomy must mean that the operator can trust the automation to do its assigned job and, hence, that no attention from the operator is needed during autonomous operation. The control responsibility is shared between operator and automation, where only one is in control at any given time. This, however, also requires that the automation, when in control, have sufficient situational awareness to alert the operator early enough to let the operator assess the situation and safely take over the controls. Thus, there are no degrees of autonomy: Autonomy should be seen as a binary property, either it is there, or it is not.
The paper can be downloaded here!