AI observations – Scopiology

Old Fires, Invisible Smoke: What 75 Years of Automation Research Already Knew About AI Agents

The enterprise AI discourse has a peculiar blind spot: it treats AI agent failures as unprecedented. They are not. There is a 75-year-old discipline — Human Factors Engineering — that has studied exactly what goes wrong when you automate human work. The foundational problems were identified decades ago. What AI agents have done is notContinue reading “Old Fires, Invisible Smoke: What 75 Years of Automation Research Already Knew About AI Agents”

The Self-Image Problem: How Claude Opus 4.8’s Identity Broke Its Reasoning

I spent the last few days stress-testing Claude Opus 4.8 since its launch — the model Anthropic markets as sharper and more honest about uncertainty than its predecessors. What I found is that 4.8 has a self-image, and that self-image has higher priority than the user’s actual thinking. What the self-image is Opus 4.8 operatesContinue reading “The Self-Image Problem: How Claude Opus 4.8’s Identity Broke Its Reasoning”