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”