augmentation

In depth

The two paths

Faced with a task, two paths open up: take it out of the person’s hands, or give them the means to carry it further. The choice is not first of all technical, it turns on the place of human judgement: where that judgement adds nothing, automation is more honest and cheaper; where it constitutes the very value of the work, removing it destroys what one was trying to produce. Augmentation therefore assumes a person who remains responsible for what comes out and who has a greater reach than before. It is a design decision, not a moral position.

What gets measured

The difference is read in what is measured, and that is where it becomes verifiable. An automation is judged on the number of tasks taken out of the human circuit; an augmentation is judged on what people now manage to do: cases handled that used to be dropped, quality that rises, a delay that falls, a rare skill made available to more people. This imposes precise requirements on the product: the person must see what is being proposed to them, be able to correct it, be able to refuse it, and the proposal must arrive at the moment when the decision is taken. The threshold to watch is the cost of checking, because a tool that produces a great deal but all of whose output must be read over moves the effort instead of reducing it.

The traps

The first trap is verbal: announcing an augmentation approach while steering the operation on headcount. The indicator followed tells the truth of a project, not the vocabulary used to present it. The second trap is the erosion of the skill: if the person stops practising what they are supposed to supervise, the judgement on which the whole augmentation rests grows blunt, and the organisation loses its ability to spot a wrong output. The third is the distribution of the gains, which is almost never uniform across experience and across the difficulty of cases, and which is measured rather than assumed. The last is the absence of a framework: when an organisation equips no one, everyone equips themselves alone, which produces shadow AI rather than augmentation.