It is an interdependent world for technology and people, Still and for the foreseeable future.

The recent global outage of one of the largest digital tech platforms, which brought life to a standstill in some regions, offers valuable insights. Here are the top five takeaways:

1. Overautomation Risks: Relying heavily on automation without proper validation from expert human skills is perilous.
2. Unvalidated Virtual Era: Our fascination with the virtual era is premature. It lacks the consistent performance and standards that manufacturing has upheld over the last decade.
3. Inevitable Automation: Despite accidents, automation is unavoidable. Providers must ensure leadership oversight that integrates human expertise with technology adoption and governance.
4. Balanced Automation Vision: Scale automation in a way that aligns with human capacity in the short term while being scalable in the long term. Investment in time is crucial, not just market hype or investor pressure.
5. Human Accountability: Empower people with automation to boost productivity, but also nurture them to ensure they remain accountable and effective.

Disclosure: The concept for the cover image generated for this article was done using Dall E2, and the article itself was reformatted (not re-written) using ChatGPT4o.