- Published on
The Warm Body Problem
- Authors
- Name
- Dr. Paul Moon
A security researcher recently audited more than 40 AI deployments inside real companies, looking for the moment things went wrong. What she found wasn't a string of AI failures. It was a string of human ones — the person assigned to catch the AI's mistakes had, at some point nobody could quite name, stopped looking.
She calls it the warm body problem. A name is still listed next to "human in the loop." The loop itself went quiet a while ago.
I think about this the same way I think about a leader's Thursday night, or anyone's inbox, really — the checkbox was never the safeguard. The attention behind the checkbox was. A tool that promises to watch things for you doesn't remove your need to show up. If anything, it raises the cost of not showing up, because now the failure has more room to grow before anyone notices it did.
Who's still actually watching in your organization — and how would you know, this week, if they'd stopped?
From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.