Participatory Placation

Use this one weird trick to automate complex processes with AI.

Are you being let down by AI agents or other LLM-based technologies that promise the ultimate efficiency gains by reducing your reliance on humans? Are you finding that these systems cause your humans to check out mentally, rendering them ineffective for those critical times that require oversight?

Well fear not, because I’m here to tell you about this one dirty little secret from the decades-old world of industrial automation: participatory placation.

You see, people naturally disengage from tasks in which they are not active participants, even if they are meant to supervise or oversee them. This renders them unaware of the dynamic state of these processes. That is, they have little to no situational awareness and lack the ability to cooperate with an automated system.

The solution is to create tokenized touch points that keep a user engaged. Automation is still used to remove inefficiencies, but inconsequential but satisfying tasks are assigned to the human to keep them engaged. That way, when failures occur, or the system finds itself outside its scope of operation, a willing and informed human is available to take over.

The tone of this post is tongue-in-cheek. But the lesson remains. Decades have been spent addressing automation problems before the advent of AI. Don’t implement AI without learning from these lessons first..