The Ironies of Automation argument arrives for on-call: AI will improve mean MTTR while making the hard incidents slower

Sylvain Kalache·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Sylvain Kalache argued on 2026-09-04 that as AI resolves routine incidents, engineers lose the repetitions that build the judgment needed for the incidents automation cannot handle. He grounds it in Bainbridge's 1983 paper and in aviation, where turbine engines now see fewer than one in-flight shutdown per 100,000 engine flight hours and the FAA still mandates recurrent emergency training every six months, citing TransAsia 235 where the crew misidentified which propeller had failed and stalled 117 seconds after the first warning. His prediction is specific and falsifiable: average MTTR improves, resolution time for complex incidents gets worse.