Heidegger versus Carthesian Dualism or where is my hammer?

In itself, the increasing technical reliability of instrumentation and automation contributes to the reliability of human-machine systems. However, it is argued that this increased reliability can aggravate the contribution of human error in these systems. The reliability of instrumentation and automation makes these components “transparent” to the human operators in a complex system. This transparency leads operators to not properly consider the conditions of function and failure of the components, resulting in over-reliance on instrumentation and automation. The solution should be found adopting a different view on human interaction with automation, based on Heidegger´s notions of “Zuhandenheit” (being-at-hand) and “Aufdringlichkeit” (present-at-hand), and compatible with Gibson´s ecological psychology. Adopting this view has consequences for training, for the design and for the evaluation of automation and interfaces, for alarm filtering and for the interpretation of human error in accidents and incidents.