Ironies of Automation 4.0

This paper revisits a truly classic publication: Bainbridge’s Ironies of Automation (1983) - but it also aims to make the point that the insights gained many years ago are today becoming more important than ever. As we all know, it is due to technological advances that automation is leading to increasingly complex systems which considerably raises the impact of the potential effects. Bainbridge’s insights originated from manufacturing processes, but they equally apply to process control in general and to vehicle control, e.g., airplanes, road vehicles or trains. This paper shows that comparable observations can be reported and suggests a human-centered approach to overcome the problems.