Chapter 13 - The Materiality Dial: Calibrating Effort and Autonomy
Last updated 2026-07-13. This page hosts the trust-calibration source behind Chapter 13 and links into the extended materiality patterns by industry domain.
Companion activity
Use the materiality patterns and materiality prompts to choose effort and autonomy for one real task before starting it.
What this chapter argues
Not every task deserves the same loop discipline. The materiality dial is a 3×3 calibration: stakes (low / medium / high) crossed with autonomy posture (supervised / bounded / autonomous). Its diagonal is a recommended starting posture, not a universal safety boundary; context, reversibility, expertise, and domain rules may require stronger controls. The chapter argues against two failure modes: over-rigging (running heavyweight ACT discipline on a typo-class task - wastes the partner's attention) and under-rigging (running a one-shot prompt on a deploy-class decision - risks the outcome). The dial helps people choose a proportionate first posture and make departures explicit.
Key sources
Chapter 13 cites in the print book: D23, D46. Entries below are the sources this page draws on; some are related literature cited elsewhere in the book rather than in this chapter.
- D20 - Lee, J. D., and See, K. A. (2004). Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance. Human Factors, 46(1), 50-80. doi.org/10.1518/hfes.46.1.50_30392
Primary-source links
- Lee & See (2004), "Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance" - the canonical trust-calibration framework. Defines over-reliance and under-reliance as twin failure modes; underwrites the dial's two-sided-failure framing.
Chapter contents
- ACT Tenet VI (calibrate effort to stakes) and the agent-era addition (calibrate autonomy to stakes).
- Who decides, and how stakes are defined - consequence severity, reversibility, blast radius, detectability.
- The 3×3 materiality dial diagram (stakes × autonomy posture).
- The diagonal (matched effort) vs. off-diagonal (compensating controls) framing.
- The clean operational rule, and the over-rigging and under-rigging failure modes.
- The dial in four cases: when to engage reasoning, when to skip the loop entirely, when to grant agency to an agent.
Related resources
The materiality patterns by domain apply the 3×3 dial across software engineering, healthcare, legal, policy, education, customer support, and financial operations. Each domain entry shows where the dial sits and which compensating controls the domain demands. The materiality prompts provide stakes-assessment and autonomy-posture-selector templates.