Juan Enriquez

A British psychologist wrote a paper in 1983 that predicted every single problem we’re having with AI in 2026. It's called “Ironies of Automation” More advanced and reliable an automated system gets, the more crucial the human operator becomes. When engineers build an autonomous system, they automate the predictable tasks. What do they leave for the human? Only the most complex, chaotic, and dangerous edge cases that the engineers themselves couldn't figure out how to code. We are rapidly turning developers, writers, and operators into "AI supervisors." But cognitive skills deteriorate when they aren't actively used. If an AI agent or Copilot does 99% of the work, the human loses their deep mental model of the codebase or the system. When the AI inevitably hallucinates or fails, it hands control back to the human. But the human is now totally out of practice, right at the exact moment they have to step in and solve a catastrophic edge case. The Monitoring Illusion We expect humans to just "supervise" AI output. But humans are biologically terrible at maintaining vigilance while waiting for rare errors. Worse, if an AI is deployed because it processes data faster and handles more variables than a human, it is physically impossible for the human to check the AI's logic in real time. You cannot supervise a black box that thinks faster than you. We aren't removing human error with AI. We are just delaying it to the absolute worst possible moment. As we shift heavily into vibe coding and agentic workflows, the warning from 1983 is urgent. If you just mindlessly supervise the AI and stop practicing the core skill yourself, you won't be able to step in when the machine breaks.