Must Read: Ironies of Automation

Stumbled upon a 35-year-old article describing the ironies of automation (HT: The Morning Paper). Here’s a teaser…

Unfortunately automatic control can ‘camouflage’ system failure by controlling against the variable changes, so that trends do not become apparent until they are beyond control.

In simpler words: when things fail, they fail really badly because the intermittent failures were kept hidden. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you how wonderful software-defined AI-assisted networking is going to be.

1 comments:

  1. Hi Ivan,
    you might like this paper from 2012: The ironies of automation… still going strong at 30?
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231537926_The_ironies_of_automation_still_going_strong_at_30
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