prospective 
The Autonomy Ladder: AI, Performance Engineering, and the Place of the Human
AI is climbing through performance engineering and observability the way autopilots climbed through aviation: eating the mechanical work first, then the analytical work, and now reaching for the interpretive work. This essay proposes a durable reading grid — an autonomy ladder transposed from autonomous driving — to locate any tool, present or future, and to ask the only question that stays stable over time: as the machine climbs each rung, where does the human move, and what must the human still know how to do?