Designing for Emergent Security in Heterogeneous Human-Machine Teams

Abstract: This work seeks to design decisionmaking rules for autonomous agents to jointly influence and optimize the behavior of teamed human decisionmakers in the presence of an adversary. We study a situation in which computational jobs are scheduled on servers by a collection of autonomous machines in concert with self-interested human decisionmakers, and the human and machine schedulers must react to an adversary's attack on one of the servers. We show a simple machine scheduling policy such that if all schedulers have permission to schedule jobs on all servers, increasing the penetration of machine schedulers always increases the level of security in the system, even when the machine schedulers have no explicit coordination or communication amongst themselves. However, we show a companion result in which simple constraints on server availability can nullify the machine schedulers' ability to effectively influence human schedulers; here, even if machine schedulers control an overwhelming majority of jobs, are socially-aware, and fully coordinated amongst themselves, they are incapable of influencing human decisionmakers to mitigate the harm of an attack.