Very Boring but Very Responsible

In 1983 Lisanne Bainbridge wrote a short paper called Ironies of Automation. The irony she cared most about was that the more capable the automation, the less practice the human operator gets, and the more important it becomes that the human can take over when the automation fails. A job that’s mostly monitoring, she wrote, is “very boring but very responsible”. She was writing about chemical plants and cockpits. Annie Vella has spent this year arguing that she was also writing about us.