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

The XY Problem (or X-Y Problem) often comes up in software development or customer support, where someone asks for help to achieve a solution (X) that they have chosen as a way to solve a different problem (Y). Helping with their solution may not help them solve their actual problem if it's not a good approach in the first place.

An example from software development is a person asking how to extract the last three characters of a filename (solution X), because they want to know the file type (problem Y). After helping them do solution X, it still wouldn't solve problem Y as some files have extensions of more than three characters.

Another example is a customer asking for help accessing their online account without realising that what they really want to do has to be done over the phone anyway.

There's art and skill in respectfully answering questions and helping with what's asked while seeking to understand the real goal. And if you're asking questions, providing more context may help others provide better answers.

In development, it saves time and effort. In customer support, it leads to happy customers. In design, it may be uncovering unmet needs.

The name is indirectly from Eric Raymond in How to Ask Questions the Smart Way:

A: If what you want is to do Y, you should ask that question without pre-supposing the use of a method that may not be appropriate. Questions of this form often indicate a person who is not merely ignorant about X, but confused about what problem Y they are solving and too fixated on the details of their particular situation."

Also see a better hierarchy of needs, the metrics onion, challenge and clarification questions, prefer open-ended questions, ask the question at talks, don't fill the silence.

The XY Problem

A phone zombie is a regular pedestrian turned zombie walker because they’re busy staring at their phone.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be a phone zombie—whether it’s a notification about where you’re about to meet, a message about something you just finished at work, texting to say you’re on your way home, a sudden thought to look something up, reading a weekly newsletter, or maybe it’s just switching the podcast. On a long, quiet street on my commute, I’ve also read a book while walking. There are so many reasons why it’s easy to turn into a phone zombie walking unthinkingly down the street.

Once, while waiting for a crossing light to change and checking train times on my phone, I noticed the people around me starting to cross. Taking my cue, I began to walk too, only realising a few steps later, with a car bearing down on me, that the light hadn’t changed to signal it was ok to cross. I’ve also seen people walk into cyclists, a near miss with a bus driving close to the curb, and someone tripping and falling. Take care, and don’t let it be you!

Also known as smartphone zombies, smombie for short, or zombie pedestrians.

You can get a printed gift of phone zombies, but as zombies aren't that nice to look at, I also made a friendlier version of phone zombies

Also see: continuous partial attention, when drinking tea and phubbing

Phone zombie

Phubbing: snubbing people for your phone.

We've probably all experienced it — heck, we've probably all done it at one point or another — or at least it's likely to be familiar. Someone in a restaurant waiting for their friends to put their phones down. A family gathering where people are no longer talking to each other. A teacher without the attention of their students. A child failing to get the attention of an adult who's trying to process some messages on their phone.

Research on phubbing, mostly since the word was coined, says it largely has the effects you'd think it would. The effects vary with who's being phubbed and who's doing the phubbing: bosses and employees, family members, parents and kids, or partners. Whoever's phubbing who, snubbing is a suitable root word for it — it's not so nice to feel snubbed.

I learned about phubbing from the Mind over Tech community — they also have a newsletter on forming better digital habits.

The word phubbing has the unusual distinction of being created for an advertising campaign to sell a dictionary.

Phubbing, you may have spotted, is a portemanteau. For more phone annoyance see halfalogue.

See, for example, Knausenberger, J. et al. (2022). Feeling Ostracized by Others’ Smartphone Use: The Effect of Phubbing on Fundamental Needs, Mood, and Trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.883901

Also see: phone zombie, continuous partial attention, when drinking tea

Phubbing

Phishing is tricking people into sharing personal details and logins by pretending to be someone else, and it's surprisingly effective. Some of the smartest people I know have been taken in by it and it only takes a moment’s lapse in concentration or uncertainty to fall for it. The maths is simple: it barely costs anything to send an email to 100,000s of people and it only needs a few people to get caught in the net for it to pay off.

Also, look out for targeted spear-phishing attacks where scammers may seem to know specific details about yourself to make the attack more credible. Or what’s known as whaling — the targeting of high-profile figures such has heads of companies or celebrities with elaborately planned and sometimes very convincing schemes.

You can also check if you’ve been caught in a data breach at: Have I been Pwned.

I updated this image for my book Big Ideas Little Pictures

Types of phishing

Continuous partial attention describes the state many of us find ourselves in as we try to stay connected to all the different areas of life that are now possible — as a result, we pay only partial attention to anything.

The accompanying stress or tension and, sometimes, decrease in relationship quality may contribute towards our increasing desire and awareness for the opposite: the wholly disconnected times of meditation, yoga, forest bathing, time in the outdoors (the 3-day effect), and other activities that allow us to give our full engaged attention for our wellbeing once more.

Continuous partial attention was coined by Linda Stone.

Continuous partial attention

Two-factor authentication is a neat technique for adding extra security by requiring two different types of verification. So, rather than asking you to provide two passwords—both things you could remember or find written down—if you are asked to provide a password and a code you could only have if you had a particular device, security is greatly enhanced.

The usual factors involved include asking for two from:

Hence the convenience of photo ID where you have to provide the ID and also look like the photo. Or provide a ticket and a code, or a chip and pin…

Also see: choose passwords that make you happy, and 8 character passwords

2 factor authentication

Metcalfe's Law is: "The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system."
— Robert Metcalfe

This law explains a little of the remarkable power of a growing network. Each time you add a user or node to the network, the number of connections increases in proportion to the square of the number of users. So, in this simple example where every new node gets a connection to each of the existing nodes, you can see that, say, adding a single node to an 11-node network creates 11 new connections.

It’s a simplified example because in most networks, the value is not directly proportional to the number of connections as some connections or users may be more valuable than others, and usually, adding a new user wouldn’t create a connection to all existing users — say if it was in a different country, or people spoke a different language or just cared about different things. But nevertheless, you can see how a network quickly becomes valuable as users join.

So, Facebook has about 2 billion users…

Metcalfe was talking about telecommunications networks, and the basic proposition has been modified since it was formulated, including by Metcalfe himself.

Just because something is called a law doesn’t mean it is one. See

Metcalfe’s Law

Rubberducking is a problem-solving technique where you explain your code or task to a rubber duck—or any inanimate object—and discover the solution yourself through the act of explaining. It's brilliant because it works and is effectively free.

Rubberducking, or rubber ducking, is most commonly associated with debugging in software development but can be applied to any problem-solving process.

The name comes from the book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. In it, the authors suggest using a rubber duck as a conversation partner to clarify one’s thoughts. This is an accessible and effective way to troubleshoot problems without requiring someone else’s time.

Have you ever been called over to someone’s desk to help them solve a problem, and as they explain the problem to you or demonstrate it, they figure out the answer themselves? It happens all the time to me, particularly when someone's showing me how something doesn't work, and it magically works just by having me watch over their shoulder.

The rubber duck technique is as simple as that, except that instead of calling someone over, you can simply replace the person with a rubber duck, teddy bear or heck, even your stapler.

The psychology behind rubberducking relies on how explaining a problem forces you to process your thoughts more clearly, often revealing gaps or errors in your understanding. Here’s how you can try it yourself:

1. Set up your “duck”: Place a rubber duck, teddy bear, or any object on your desk.

2. Explain your problem: Describe your code, logic, or issue to the duck, step by step, as if you’re teaching it.

3. Watch for insights: In explaining it aloud, you’ll often uncover what’s wrong or identify a new approach to solving it.

For example, a developer struggling with a bug might explain every line of code to the duck. Verbalising their logic can highlight an overlooked detail that resolves the problem.

Rubberducking works because it forces you to articulate your thoughts clearly, moving them from abstract notions in your head to concrete statements. This shift can:

• Help you identify assumptions you didn’t realise you were making.

• Mimic the process of pair programming without needing another person.

Rubberducking a problem also reduces dependency on others for problem-solving, making it a cost-effective—basically free!—and time-efficient tool for debugging.

Here are some situations where it’s particularly useful:

• Debugging code: Talk through an error or bug in your program.

• Explaining logic: Test the clarity of your solution by explaining it step by step.

• Learning new concepts: Summarise a concept to the duck to check your understanding (see the Feynman Learning Technique)

• Decision-making: Walk through the pros and cons of a decision.

In software development, rubber duck debugging has become a recognised term for this process. It’s so common that some developers keep an actual rubber duck on their desks to symbolise this practice. Teams might 'joke' about needing “a duck” for the simplest bugs.

Debugging is an integral part of coding, and the rubber duck technique makes it less daunting. By verbalising your thought process, you streamline problem-solving without needing external help.

Frequently Asked Questions about Rubberducking

Nope. While a rubber duck is the classic choice, you can use anything nearby—your coffee cup, a stapler, or even a photo on your desk.

Q: What if talking out loud isn’t possible?

Writing out your explanation or saying it in your head can work just as well. The key is clarifying and articulating your thought process.

Q: How is this different from pair programming?

Pair programming involves working alongside another person on the same task. Some people swear by pair programming, and to be honest, I've always found it effective whenever I try it. However, rubberducking is a solo activity where the act of explanation itself is the solution.

Next time you're stuck on something, grab a rubber duck and give it a try.

Rubberducking is similar to the empty chair technique for psychotherapy, which involves speaking to an empty chair as if addressing a person.

It's also easily confused with "rubbernecking," which is slowing down to look at an accident as you drive past—a common cause of traffic jams.

What is Rubberducking? An Explanation of the Rubber Duck Debugging Technique

How the expectations of new technologies often evolves.

The Gartner Hype cycle

Moon pools are protected entrances to water that can even give the remarkable ability to enter from under the water.

First created to support drilling operations on offshore platforms, moon pools can include entrances on the decks or undersides of ships or an entry and exit for divers from permanent underwater research bases.

For underwater entrances, also known as wet porches, the trick is to pressurize the air around the pool to the same pressure as the surrounding water. The raised pressure keeps the water from gushing in and enables a swimming pool-like entrance even though you’re already below the surface.

I've never used one, but I'd absolutely love to. One of my earliest memories of a moon pool and corresponding bafflement and wonder was in James Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss. A moon pool features in the recent trailer for the remastered version of The Abyss

Moon pool

A remarkably common pattern for the evolution of many things. You see it all the time in the evolution of technical things, but also many systems in general.

When you start to reach the top of the limits of what one system can do you’ll start to see a focus on efficiency, cost reduction and small improvements and optimisation. This is great because it forces a new creative solution to arise in order to make any real progress. An image search gives a few examples.

The S-curve

Pace Layers is the brilliant observation of Stewart Brand that different aspects of the world change at different speeds.

So, Fashion and art change and cycle faster than Commerce, which changes faster than Infrastructure, and in turn, Governance, Culture and finally, Nature.

The outer layers tend to innovate faster and so pull along the slower-changing layers. At the same time, the slower layers also stabilise the faster layers, reducing the chances of chaos.

At the boundaries, you get constructive turbulence, say, between self-driving cars and Governance or between legislation trying to keep up with the growth of electric scooters. Or how the growth in video streaming (Commerce) needs Internet Infrastructure to come along with it.

As a framework for thinking about big, complex things, I find it quite handy.

Pace layers

Update: for times when you really need to remember a password I still like this technique, for all other times — which is to say, ideally every time — I suggest using a password manager. Use a password manager to generate unique passwords for every service so long and complex that you couldn't possibly be bothered to type it and that will force you to always use the manager instead.

However, for the few passwords that you can't avoid typing they might as well remind you of something good. I have found this makes me happier.

Choose passwords that make you happy

This chart is from the original he published - just the five data points. Pretty simple huh? The “observation, originally made in 1965, that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would continue to double every year. Although this increase has slowed to a doubling in eighteen to twenty four months, Moore’s law has held true for nearly fifty years and is the foundation for the astounding Information Technology revolution we see around us.”

For those interested in Moore’s law, remarkably, I think the best information is my Dad’s book, The Computing Universe, which is also the source of the quote.

Moore’s Law

Desire paths: created by desire and use. Sometimes I find myself walking on the traces of one as a statement that ‘there ought to be a path here’ - voting with my feet.

There’s the classic, perhaps apocryphal, story of the architect who didn’t build any paths on a campus until people had worn them in, showing where the paths should be.

The phenomena has found use in technology with the phrase 'pave the cowpaths’.

One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) also discuss Chicago transportation engineers’ use of ‘desire lines’ to describe maps of straight-line origin-to-destination journeys across the city, in the process revealing assumptions about the public’s ‘desire’ to undertake these journeys. In either sense, desire lines (along with use-marks (Burns, 2007)) could perhaps, using economic terminology, be seen as a form of revealed user preference (Beshears et al, 2008) or at least revealed choice, with a substantial normative quality.

Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review, Dan Lockton, Sep 2011

Or see this very concrete example from UC Berkeley at peterme.com.

Desire path

We usually only see the winners. The losers tend to disappear from the record. Which is why all the fund managers in the papers seem to be giving great returns, or starting the next Whatsapp or Instagram seems like such a sure fire way to get rich. We don’t see all the funds, apps and entrepreneurs who never made it.

Survivorship bias

Cheat sheet for Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Understanding the Chasm

Knowing a little of the fundamentals really helps you appreciate why people always create such giant PowerPoint files all the time by mistake (hint: the standard screen capture pastes as a bitmap) and why images go grainy on the Internet or load really slow.

Understanding gifs, bitmaps and jpegs

One of the biggest benefits of digital music. Now you don’t have to listen to that rubbish one on the album. Don’t be shy.

Delete tracks you don’t like

You will recognise this when you have spent 40 minutes off and on trying to do something online when you could have been spending your time happily and productively doing something else.

Bad internet is worse than no internet

They are apparently there to help you see the keys to make it easier to type. If you can type already, fold them away — it’s better for your wrists to have no bend.

Fold away keyboard feet

You can see this trend in most technology products. Increasing subtleties and functions are added improving what a product can do. At some point, the complexity is sufficient to force us to focus efforts on simplification (or the benefit great enough that a simpler technology will take over) - while maintaining functionality. Classic menus migrating to context-sensitive menus; the original NES controller, to the xbox controller to Wii and Kinect control, Yahoo’s list-the-web, to Google’s search the web, multiple glasses to photochromic glasses, and so on.

I believe this observation is from Edward De Bono, but I learned it from Darrell Mann. I keep finding it helpful.

Things get more complex before they get simple

A nifty technique for making fonts appear smoother when viewed on a screen rendering pixels.

Anti-aliasing

The combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO setting control the effect you get in your photograph. Ultimately, it depends on the shot you want, and in any situation, someone may want to use a different combination than you, but knowing the basics helps.

Now, go read the manual and experiment with some of those extra buttons on your DSLR.

Putting it all together: Exposure

The clever folks — Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith — who invented the CCD sensor, the basis of what enables modern digital cameras to capture light and record a photograph were awarded the Nobel prize for their troubles. And the silver halide film Kodak were famous for is equally remarkable.

Understanding ISO

The length of time the shutter is open, and therefore the light can reach the sensor.

Understanding shutter speed

A little mini-series and a little challenge for me to try and condense the interplay of the key aspects of control for photography into a few short sketches (I thought about doing this much earlier, but kept kicking it down the line). Please let me know in the following ones if it helped. Though the only way really, is to get out there, play with the settings, take some pictures and learn.

One of the biggest benefits of digital photography has been the narrowing of the feedback loop between taking a photo and seeing the result. Imagine taking some long exposure night sky shots on the perfect evening after many days hiking only to find, a week or so later, that your aperture, shutter speed, ISO combo was all out of whack. But what did you do wrong? And would you remember how to correct it next time you were up there. Now you can take, test, edit, test, learn. Any time the feedback cycle narrows between doing and learning expect big changes.

Understanding aperture

Which, remarkably, still does not mean they are secure.

There are 2.2 trillion combinations of an 8 character password

Hi, I’m Jono, and I think, where possible, it’s important to be you on the Internet just as it is in real life. Perspective from Jaron Lanier. Masks and hoods insight from Philip Zimbardo’s Psychology of Evil, TED talk.

Be real on the internets

It still takes me a moment to process, but Ryan, for example, is much closer to S, than it is the beginning of R. Consider starting at the next letter for some searches.

Consider starting at the next letter (when scanning address books)

I love the idea that the computer just disappears backwards into the plug. Neal Moore first mentioned this to me. In the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving there’s an idea that all functions will eventually be subsumed by the system above it. Assuming that we will always need some sort of power it makes sense that the computer will disappear into there at some point. The iMac was essentially a jump where the computer disappeared into the screen. For this reason I’ve often thought that floors, walls and ceilings should be given more thought than they are. When everything else has changed, I reckon they will still be around. I wouldn’t mind if our dinner table disappeared into the floor once we were done with it for example.

Plug computing

The realisation originally came to me when I saw, pinned outside a Professor’s door, an entire sheet of plain letter paper with a single line quote at the top. The standards are driving the system. About time we got more flexible.

If we plumbed in printers

OK, so this seems like the most complex yet, but I find myself doing this small and rapid series of key strokes many times a day and it saves a whole lot of fiddling.

Update: Several people have helpfully pointed out to me that you can do this better and more easily simply with Control + shift + v on PC and Command + Alt + Shift + V on Mac. More time saved!

Remove text formatting

Not enough people understand those tricky level diagrams. Generally, move the white and black points to the edge of the data to get the most range out of the data in your photo.

Adjust a photo’s levels to maximise your data

Get to know your tech

It still amazes me how few people know this most handy of tips.

Tech sketches