Ironies of Automation: A Comedy in Three Parts
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As much as we often wish we could eliminate that “squishy humans” from the loop in order to maximize our system reliability, automation usually has unintended consequences. “The Ironies of Automation,” a seminal paper on the problems that automation, spelled these out quite clearly and still stands the test of time—over 30 years later.
Join our fictional SRE as they attempt to automate a set of tasks. As the side effects and newly introduced problems continue to mount, they will learn an important lesson about human error, and how to strike the all important balance for SREs between human and machine.