PERSON
Lisanne Bainbridge
The British cognitive psychologist whose 1983 paper “Ironies of Automation” identified the structural paradox that every generation of automation reproduces: the designer who automates a system to eliminate human error creates a system that makes human error more consequential at precisely the moments that matter most.
Lisanne Bainbridge is the analyst of the gap between the system’s design and the human it assumes. Working through the 1970s and 1980s at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge and later at University College London, she studied what happened when human beings were shifted from performing tasks to monitoring the machines that performed them in industrial process control. What she found, documented in the 1983 paper that became one of the most cited works in the history of human factors engineering, was a pattern she called an
irony: the more reliable the automated system became, the more crucial the human’s contribution became during the rare moments when the system failed — and yet the more difficult it became for the human to provide that contribution, because the reliability of the automation degraded the very skills it needed the human to retain. This is the structural paradox of automation,