The Ironies of A^2 I^2

The talk frames “ironies of automation” and “ironies of AI” as ways automation and AI influence incidents. It uses the idea that “A squared” expands to automation and artificial intelligence in incidents. The session includes incident story time and a discussion of ETTO, then moves toward practical implications. It emphasizes that software systems can be safety-critical, citing large-scale outages that disrupt major parts of the internet. It highlights human factors and system safety, arguing that human aspects are central in these systems. It also notes growing participation from software professionals in human factors and system safety training.

"The carets were supposed to be subscripts, so like the ironies of A squared, I squared, or AI squared, and that expands to the ironies of automation and artificial intelligence in incidents. We're going to be talking about automation and AI, and how they show up in incidents. As I said, what do we mean by ironies of automation? What are we going to talk about today? Ironies of automation, what do I mean by that? What does this have to do with AI? What do we mean by ironies of AI? I promised incident story time, so we will have incident story time."

"The one thing I did want to point out is the Human Factors and System Safety Masters. The reason I bring that up, it's not about bragging. What we're going to be talking about is some of the stuff that we studied about human factors and system safety. One of the interesting things is there's more and more software people going through that program. My classmates were pilots, and nurses, and doctors, and air traffic controllers, and they laughed when I said I work in software."

"They're like, why is that a safety critical system? I think you all know why it can be a safety critical system. I think the AWS outage of a couple weeks when we saw parts of our world, parts of the entire internet fall apart. We all know where the safety comes in here. One of the interesting things here about is that we also focus on the human factors and the human aspect in these systems. The all of you, the all of us in these systems."

"We're going to talk a little bit about ETTO. Then we'll end with, this is all maybe fascinating and interesting, now what do we do with all this stuff? This is for me, actually, I'm really curious, who is a developer? Who's Ops, SRE, Platform Eng? Who's on an on-call rotation? Who's on call right now?"

Read at InfoQ