I really like this author's summary of the 1983 Bainbridge paper about industrial automation. I have often wondered how to apply those insights to AI agents, but I was never able to summarize it as well as OP.

Bainbridge by itself is a tough paper to read because it's so dense. It's just four pages long and worth following along:

https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...

For example, see this statement in the paper: "the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have."

This summarizes the first irony of automation, which is now familiar to everyone on HN: using AI agents effectively requires an expert programmer, but to build the skills to be an expert programmer, you have to program yourself.

It's full of insights like that. Highly recommended!

I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment, which means that general purpose models are starting to run out of contemporary, low-cost training data.

So either training data is going to get more expensive because you're going to have to pay creators, or these models will slowly drift away from the contemporary cultural reality.

We'll see where it all lands, but it seems clear that this is a circular problem with a time delay, and we're just waiting to see what the downstream effect will be.

Yes! One could argue that we might end up with programmers (experts) going through a training of creating software manually first, before becoming operators of AI, and then also spending regularly some of their working time (10 - 20%?) on keeping these skills sharp - by working on purely education projects, in the old school way; but it begs the question:

Does it then really speeds us up and generally makes things better?

I kinda fear that this is an economic plane stall, we're tilting upward so much, the underlying conditions are about to dissolve

And I'd add, that recent LLMs magic (i admit they reached a maturity level that is hard to deny) is also a two edged sword, they don't create abstraction often, they create a very well made set of byproducts (code, conf, docs, else) to realize your demand, but people right now don't need to create new improved methods, frameworks, paradigms because the LLM doesn't have our mental constraints.. (maybe later reasoning LLMs will tackle that, plausibly)

The author's conclusion feels even more relevant today: AI automation doesn’t really remove human difficulty—it just moves it around, often making it harder to notice and more risky. And even after a human steps in, there’s usually a lot of follow-up and adjustment work left to do. Thanks for surfacing these uncomfortable but relevant insights

>the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.

But we are in the later generation now. All the 1983 operators are now retired, and today's factory operators have never had the experience of 'doing it by hand'.

Operators still have skills, but it's 'what to do when the machine fails' rather than 'how to operate fully manually'. Many systems cannot be operated fully manually under any conditions.

And yet they're still doing great. Factory automation has been wildly successful and is responsible for why manufactured goods are so plentiful and inexpensive today.

>skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.

You can't ring more true than this. For decades now.

For a couple years there I was able to get some ML together and it helped me get my job done, never came close to AI, I only had kilobytes of memory anyway.

By the time 1983 rolled around I could see the writing on the wall, AI was going to take over a good share of automation tasks in a more intelligent way by bumping the expert systems up a notch. Sometimes this is going to be a quantum notch and it could end up like "expertise squared" or "productivity squared" [0]. At the rarefied upper bound. Using programmable electronics to multiply the abilities of the true expert whilst simultaneously the expert utilized their abilities to multiply the effectiveness of the electronics. Maybe only reaching the apex when the most experienced domain expert does the programming, or at least runs the show.

Never did see that paper, but it was obvious to many.

I probably mentioned this before, but that's when I really bucked down for a lifetime of experimental natural science across a very broad range of areas which would be more & more suitable for automation. While operating professionally within a very narrow niche where personal participation would remain the source of truth long enough for compounding to occur. I had already been a strong automation pioneer in my own environment.

So I was always fine regardless of the overall automation landscape, and spent the necessary decades across thousands of surprising edge cases getting an idea how I would make it possible for someone else to even accomplish some of these difficult objectives, or perhaps one day fully automate. If the machine intelligence ever got good enough. Along with the other electronics, which is one of the areas I was concentrating on.

One of the key strategies did turn out to be outliving those who had extensive troves of their own findings, but I really have not automated that much. As my experience level becomes less common, people seem to want me to perform in person with greater desire every decade :\

There's related concepts for that too, some more intelligent than others ;)

[0] With a timely nod to a college room mate who coined the term "bullshit squared"

I mean how did you get an expert programmer before ? Surely it can’t be harder to learn to program with ai than without ai. It’s written in the book of resnet.

You could swap out ai with google or stackoverflow or documentation or unix…

The same argument was there about needing to be an expert programmer in assembly language to use C, and then same for C and Python, and then Python and CUDA, and then Theano/Tensorflow/Pytorch.

And yet here we are, able to talk to a computer, that writes Pytorch code that orchestrates the complexity below it. And even talks back coherently sometimes.