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References: The Siren Song of Automation

  1. Siren (mythology) - Wikipedia - Origins and evolution of siren mythology from Homer's Odyssey through Renaissance art, providing the allegorical framework for automation's seductive promises.

  2. Automation bias - Wikipedia - Psychological research on humans' tendency to over-rely on automated systems, the cognitive vulnerability the chapter's sirens exploit.

  3. Robotic process automation - Wikipedia - Overview of software-based automation in business processes, the specific technology most often sold with the "set it and forget it" promise this chapter critiques.

  4. Automating Inequality - Virginia Eubanks - St. Martin's Press - Investigation of how automated systems can amplify existing biases and cause real harm, the darker consequence of following the siren song without critical evaluation.

  5. Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil - Crown Books - Data scientist's exposé of how algorithms can encode and scale discrimination, supporting the chapter's warning about uncritical automation adoption.

  6. Automation Failures - IEEE Spectrum - Engineering case studies of automation systems that failed in production, providing real-world wreckage from the rocks the chapter's sirens guard.

  7. The Ironies of Automation - ScienceDirect / Lisanne Bainbridge - The foundational 1983 paper on how automation creates new human-factors problems even as it solves old ones, still cited and still relevant.

  8. Customer Service Automation Failures - Forbes - Reports on companies that automated customer service and discovered that customers prefer humans who listen over chatbots that don't, illustrating the chapter's cautionary tales.

  9. Boeing 737 MAX and Automation - The New York Times - Investigation of how over-reliance on automated systems contributed to fatal crashes, the chapter's most sobering real-world parallel.

  10. Odyssey, Book XII - Project Gutenberg / Homer - The original siren episode in full, freely available for students to compare Odysseus's strategy of controlled exposure with the chapter's technology adoption advice.