Why Bainbridge's 1983 'Ironies of Automation' predicts the AI agent era's core problem
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-09-26
Bainbridge's 1983 classic 'Ironies of Automation' argues that automating most work leaves humans with only the unautomatable tasks: they stop practicing skills, take on exhausting monitoring, and thus need more training — not less — to handle rare but crucial interventions. The paper is widely cited in debates on human oversight in the AI agent era.
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