The Skill You're Losing While the Tool Does the Work

In 1983, a cognitive psychologist named Lisanne Bainbridge published a four-page paper that almost nobody outside her field has ever read.

She was studying industrial control rooms — nuclear plants, chemical refineries, flight decks. Not exactly the world of the solopreneur. But what she saw there has been sitting in the back of my mind all week, because it describes something I watch happen to women in business every single day.

Her argument was this: the more sophisticated an automated system becomes, the more demanding the human role within it — not less.

She called it the ironies of automation.

Here’s the irony she had in mind. When you automate the routine parts of a job, you don’t remove the human. You relocate them. You leave them responsible for exactly the parts that couldn’t be automated: the rare, the ambiguous, the high-stakes calls.

And because the machine now handles everything ordinary, the human gets less and less practice. Their skill at the hard part erodes — at exactly the moment the hard part is all that’s left.

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Read that as a description of your week with AI.

Generating is the routine now. It’s what became frictionless. You can produce a first draft, a caption, an email, a content calendar — faster than you could have imagined five years ago.

What didn’t get easier is the decision that has to come before any of that.

Who is this for. What does it have to do. What are you unwilling to soften.

That’s the part that was always yours. And it’s the part you’re getting fewer reps at — because the tool is right there, and the deadline is real, and it’s so much easier to generate first and decide later.

Except later, when you’re reading forty options that are all technically fine, you realize you can’t choose. Not because the options are bad. Because you skipped the step that would have told you which one was right.

That’s not a tool problem. That’s Bainbridge, forty years early, describing your Tuesday.

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I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument against using AI. Bainbridge wasn’t arguing against automation either. She was arguing that the human role inside an automated system has to be designed deliberately — not inherited by default.

The operators who struggled weren’t the ones who used automated systems. They were the ones who used them without ever thinking about what they were giving up in the process.

The question isn’t whether to use the tool. It’s whether you’re staying sharp at the thing the tool can’t do for you.

And that thing — the deciding, the positioning, the point of view — is a muscle. It gets stronger with use and weaker without it.

The tool gets better the more you use it. The question is whether you do too.

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Tomorrow I want to talk about something that follows directly from this: what happens when the output is wrong. Who answers for it. And why the answer to that question should change how you think about every prompt you write.

Every Thursday I send out The Smart Stack Newsletter — practical, honest, no-hype AI insights for women entrepreneurs who are ready to think first and act smart. Sign up here and join us: https://carenglasser.com/#contact