[mlyle]

> Right, and until this happens these systems are not HITL.

You're drawing the system line strangely and making the choice about "in the loop" strangely.

A human decided to hook it up to a plugin with their Github credentials and to allow it to do actions without pre-approval. A human was still in the loop because the human then didn't like what it did and disconnected it. It only did a single action, rather than the kinds of scripting mistakes that I've seen that can do hundreds, but it still wasn't a very sane default for that plugin.

Is my cruise control HITL? It does not ask for my pre-approval before speeding up or slowing down.

[ethanbond]

Is a reasonable person surprised when their cruise control changes speed?

[mlyle]

Sometimes, yes. The radar my old Infiniti G35 used would sometimes get confused when facing into the sun in the late or early day and do bad things (in either direction: losing the car in front of it or decelerating unnecessarily). It was still HITL: I'd tap the brake and mitigate the bad thing it was doing.

HITL doesn't mean that a human never has to intervene or is never surprised by what the system does. It just means that a human initiates actions and can exercise genuine oversight and control.