The Automation Paradox is that the better our machines get, the more we struggle when they fail.

When heading out for a hike in the woods, it's tempting to skip the map and compass and rely on our phones and apps for navigation. Yet when we encounter no signal or lose power, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation. Or perhaps, like me, you've come to rely on popping your destination into the satnav or Google Maps whenever you get in the car and have nearly forgotten the ability to navigate without it.

These situations illustrate the paradox of automation, where the more sophisticated and automated our machines and technologies become, the more bewildered we find ourselves when they inevitably fail. Or: the smarter the machines get, the dumber we might get.

In his book Messy, Tim Harford suggests three strands to the paradox as our machines get more sophisticated:

Automation covers up our mistakes, hiding our incompetence, meaning we may not learn to correct ourselves—consider autocorrect cleaning up our typos as we go.

When we rely on automation, we get less practice for our skills, so even highly skilled individuals may find their expertise diminishing—perhaps you've found yourself using your phone calculator for a trivial calculation.

When the easy scenarios are taken care of, failures may occur in complex or unpredictable ways that we may find especially difficult to recover from—like a subtle but persistent failure in the steering of a passenger plane, recovering from a skid on an icy road, or when you're deeply lost in the wilderness.

More sophisticated technology can even make it useless or more dangerous when it fails. Older cars used to be reparable forever. Now, if your vehicle fails, it's likely to need plugging in at the dealership to figure out what's up. How many electronic devices are thrown away because somewhere inside, some tiny loose connection or component makes the whole thing worthless? Were pilots and flight crews better prepared and able to improvise before the autopilot became ubiquitous?

I often wish our devices would fail more like an escalator or an electric toothbrush. If an escalator fails, you can still walk up it. If your electric toothbrush dies, you can still use it to brush your teeth. These could be called Technology-Enhanced Products, perhaps. But when most of our devices die, they're often rendered worthless.

Automation and sophisticated machines help me so much. I did use Grammarly to help check this post. I use Google Maps nearly every time I put in my destination to home, and I often use a calculator to check my maths. But I do pay attention to grammar corrections, bring a paper map when I can, and keep trying to do the maths in my head.

But as Tim Harford explains it, we still face "the paradox of automation: the better the machines get, the more bewildered we are when the machines fail."

The Dunning-Kruger effect (send me proof of purchase of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and I'll send the sketch to you)

Tolkein-style landscape inspired by the excellent Lord of Maps.

The Automation Paradox

Sell painkillers, not vitamins, the classic business advice goes.

The vitamin seller aims to help you stay healthy in the long run— to help you avoid future pain and trial by keeping you clear of sickness.

However, the painkiller seller has some advantages. If you're experiencing pain right now, a painkiller offers immediate relief. The benefit is instant and tangible. Unlike the vague and uncertain nature of future illnesses, pain is immediate and unmistakable.

Knowing if a painkiller worked is easy, as the pain will disappear. It's hard to tell if a vitamin worked. If I don't get sick, was it the vitamins, my sleep, exercise, or, well, anything else that did it?

This dynamic can lead to unfortunate consequences. We may prioritise our current needs over future well-being, such as fixing a broken car when it breaks rather than maintaining it. We need help saving money for the future. We tackle the "urgent" and neglect the "important-not urgent."  We might overestimate the likelihood of making good choices in the future. In essence, it's easy to downplay future challenges compared to our current predicament.

implementing security measures vs. fixing bugs

looking after your car vs. fixing your car when it breaks down

doing daily exercises vs. going to the doctor when you're sick

shopping and preparing food vs. ordering takeaway now

making a product easier to use vs. making the product compliant

preparing fruit to eat later vs. grabbing a cookie now

insulating your house vs. putting the heating on now

Some see business as selling candy, vitamins, and painkillers. Candy is a treat, but it's easy to live without. Vitamins promise to make life better, but you can do without them. Painkillers are must-haves as they solve an immediate, tangible need.

Also see: present bias, tragedy of the commons, the dilution effect, the Shirky principle.

Painkillers and vitamins

I've been there. I'm holding some packaging that kind of looks like it ought to be recyclable but isn't one of the standard products that are asked for. I could put it in the bin and then it'll head straight to landfill, or I could put it in the recycling and then it has a chance of being recycled, right? So it often seems better to recycle it in the hope that it might be recovered rather than consign it to certain landfill. This is known as wishcycling.

Sadly, from all that I've read about wishcycling it's not the best approach. When we put in non-recyclables into a recycling bin it contaminates the high quality recyclable materials and several things can happen:

A lot of dry recycling is still manually sorted in Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs). When the quality of the input goes down it can require more people to sort it. It's not a pretty job if it also contains items that are contaminated with food waste

Non-recyclable items that processing machines aren't designed for can damage them and mean costly maintenance

Items like batteries that make it into regular recycling can start fires in paper bales which is dangerous and expensive

Non-recyclables mixed in can mean a lower quality end product to use to turn into new products. This can reduce what it can be used for and make it harder to sell

Paying more pickers and sorters and servicing machines costs money, and selling lower quality products brings less in, both of which reduce the profitability and potential viability of recycling operations

So the advice I have learned to take on board is:

Counterintuitively, if we want to recycle more, it seems at the moment we have to recycle less.

And even better is to reduce and reuse where possible in the first place.

Wishcycling

Chindogu are inventions that are not really useful yet are not completely without use. They make sense, but you’d never use them. They are also, as a result, often really funny.

This chindogu article gives some great examples while also sharing the 10 tenets of what makes chindogu, chindogu. Things like: there must be the spirit of anarchy —  they represent freedom of thought and action. And they must exist — just the idea isn’t enough; they must be made.

Apparently, the selfie stick was invented as chindogu but failed as people evidently actually found it useful — though you can still see why it might have started as chindogu.

Also see: affordance, forcing function, and more genius from the Japanese: Tsundoku

Chindogu

I’ve found this model useful in my thinking so many times. Also known as the Buying Hierarchy, it’s a model that illustrates a common evolution — though not perfect nor universal — in products and markets where an original innovation provides a performance or functionality benefit over what others can provide. As a result they can charge more as no one else does it.

When others come to deliver that too, then the focus for the customer can move to which delivers the most reliable quality. When the reliability is the same from different providers then we’ll choose the one that is more convenient.

Only once all else is equal does the lowest price option become the winning one. At this stage you’re selling a commodity where people could choose to get the same thing, just as easily, for the same quality in several places.

There’s a business to be made at each stage, but it’s sensible to know where you’re competing.

The original model is from Windermere Associates and widely shared by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

The customer value chain

This may have been obvious from day one, but despite the basic geometry of our necks it took me many years to figure out that back sleepers generally need just the one pillow and side sleepers are better off with two. Still think the pillow industry could do with a shake up though to solve basic problems like not falling into the gap between pillows, pillows made for two or pillows that more flexibly adjust as you turn over.

Back sleepers, side sleepers

The Betty Crocker effect refers to how, in the world of instant cake mixes, when something is too easy it reduces the value. The legend goes that instant cake mixtures that just needed water didn't sell nearly as well as when you needed to add an egg. Adding the egg yourself gives investment in the process of making the cake so we appreciate it more, and the extra effort demonstrates the act of love that is baking a cake.

Also easy to understand as the IKEA effect. As is so often the case, Dan Ariely explains it well. 20mins well spent watching Dan Ariely's TED talk What makes us feel good about our work?. You can jump straight to it around 12mins 50s.

The Betty Crocker Effect

Unuseless inventions. Invented by the Japanese. Worth a quick chindogu search.

Chindogu: unuseless inventions

The Generalised Peter Principle states that "Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging situations until it fails.

The Generalised Peter Principle is a specific case of the Peter Principle, which is the same idea but applied to people 😱.

I observed the Generalised Peter Principle when packing a minivan in Cambodia.

The Generalised Peter Principle

One way mirrors definitely do something, but a lot of what they accomplish is also due to maintaining dark on one side and light on another.

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Category: products