Model and Mechanisms of Consent for Responsible Autonomy

Abstract

Socio-technical systems rely on human and software agents exercising their autonomy at the right time with the right limits. This requires each agent to know what they can do, when they need help or resources from others, and how they need to interact with others to obtain these resources. To facilitate responsible autonomy, we advocate for the use of consent as an abstraction. Although consent has been a part of the software ecosystem, there has been little work to understand its dynamics formally, and to devise mechanisms to use consent in facilitating autonomy. We propose a formal representation of consent based on its philosophical roots, a life-cycle to capture its evolution over interactions, and algorithms to express the consent mechanisms computationally. Following this, we demonstrate how this representation can model and detect various realistic autonomy violations on the web using a real-life example. Finally, we demonstrate a mechanism to dynamically enable consent to regulate the appropriate use of autonomy.