There’s a great 1983 paper on “the ironies of automation” with interesting thoughts on this. For example, if nobody knows the 80%, how do they gain experience to do the hard 20%? Or, if operators become essentially low skilled, low status babysitters, the smart people required to cover the challenging 20% might just leave for higher status roles. It’s been posted here before, worth a read if you haven’t come across it.

https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...