The techie who saw it coming

I have known Vivek Rau since we were boys. One of the recurring experiences of knowing him is watching the broader industry slowly rediscover conclusions he reached years earlier. And it does, but slowly, partially, and with considerable confusion about what it has found.

A decade before the artificial intelligence (AI) industry convinced itself that it had invented the problem of human-machine division of labour, Rau sat down and wrote something quietly radical. His contribution was Chapter 5 of Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book, published in 2016 and titled, without drama, Eliminating Toil . It is the shortest chapter in the book.