The Missing Primitive — Autonomy Agreements for Human-Machine Collaboration

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:00:00 +0100

Every framework for human-AI collaboration assumes a fixed relationship: the human commands, the machine executes. This paper argues that the critical missing primitive is not better tools or smarter agents — it is a negotiated, evolving agreement between human and machine about the scope and limits of machine autonomy. We ground this proposal in cybernetics (Pask, Ashby, Beer, Bateson), pedagogy (Vygotsky, Freire, Papert), and the philosophy of tacit knowledge (Polanyi, Ryle, Dreyfus, Indian pramāṇa theory). A key observation: the pedagogy literature addresses only human-teaches-human. Human-AI collaboration creates a 2×2 matrix with four quadrants, each with different failure modes. The autonomy agreement is the first protocol designed to operate across all four — because negotiated trust and epistemic commitments are more fundamental than the direction of instruction.

Collaboration on MayaLucIA

The Missing Primitive — Autonomy Agreements for Human-Machine Collaboration