The Ironies of Automation apply eerily well to generative AI: humans get only the hardest work while their skills atrophy
i_dg23 · x · 2026-09-11
A Japanese essay argues the popular "AI makes us dumb" framing misses the point—calculator and Google Maps comparisons date back to writing itself. The real issue is Bainbridge's 1983 paper "Ironies of Automation": automating the easy tasks leaves humans only the hardest, most exceptional work, while removing their chances to practice. Example: if AI writes 99 of 100 programs perfectly, the one left for the human is a production deadlock or contradictory spec—and the programmer has lost the routine training those 99 would have provided. Endsley & Kiris experimentally studied this in 1995 as the "out-of-the-loop performance problem."
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