Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

This problem has a name: the paradox of automation. It applies to a wide variety of contexts, from the operators of a nuclear power station to the crew of a cruise ship to the simple fact that we can’t remember phone numbers anymore because we have them all stored in our cell phones and that we struggle with mental arithmetic because we’re surrounded by electronic calculators. The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more unusual will be the situations they face.3 The psychologist James Reason, author of Human Error, wrote: “Manual control is a highly skilled activity, and skills need to be practiced continuously in order to maintain them. Yet an automatic control system that fails only rarely denies operators the opportunity for practicing these basic control skills . . . when manual takeover is necessary something has usually gone wrong; this means that operators need to be more rather than less skilled in order to cope with these atypical conditions.”*4