A 1983 paper, 'Ironies of Automation,' predicted today's AI problems
karlwaldman · x · 2026-11-05
A viral thread argues that British psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 paper "Ironies of Automation" predicted nearly every AI problem we face in 2026. Key points: the more advanced and reliable an automated system becomes, the more crucial the human operator is; engineers automate the predictable tasks and leave humans only the most chaotic edge cases; developers, writers and operators are becoming "AI supervisors"; cognitive skills decay when unused — if an agent does 99% of the work, humans lose their deep mental model of the system, and are most out of practice exactly when the AI hands control back after a failure. The attached paper page notes automation can expand rather than eliminate human-related problems.
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