Difficulties arise when we do not think of people and
machines as collaborative systems, but assign whatever tasks
can be automated to the machines and leave the rest to people.
This ends up requiring people to behave in machine-like
fashion, in ways that differ from human capabilities. We
expect people to monitor machines, which means keeping alert
for long periods, something we are bad at. We require people
to do repeated operations with the extreme precision and
accuracy required by machines, again something we are not
good at. When we divide up the machine and human
components of a task in this way, we fail to take advantage of
human strengths and capabilities but instead rely upon areas
where we are genetically, biologically unsuited. Yet, when
people fail, they are blamed.