AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts

A little over a decade ago, I led the controls design for a first-of-its-kind full digital control system for a U.S. nuclear plant. It was, on paper, a beautiful machine—engineered to run itself the way a modern airliner does, with operators watching over a system that rarely needed them. And we made a decision that, to an efficiency-minded observer, looked backward: We deliberately left manual steps inside sequences the system could execute on its own. We were solving a specific problem. An ope

Original reporting by IEEE Spectrum AI · Richard Mitchell. GridIndex is an aggregation and intelligence layer — full credit to the original publisher.