What are Children of the Magenta?

Welcome to my collection of notes on automation, agency, and the human future.

The phrase comes from a classic 1997 training session by legendary American Airlines Captain Warren “Van” Vanderburgh, who warned that pilots were becoming “children of the magenta” - so dependent on following the magenta line (the programmed flight path displayed in magenta on navigation screens, as in the example below) that they’d neglect to or, worse, had entirely forgotten how to, simply fly the airplane.

Vanderburgh understood earlier than most that automation dependency wasn’t just about the technology itself, but about losing the judgment to know when to use it. Crews were becoming task-saturated trying to maintain the highest level of automation in situations that called for dropping down to basics.

They were following the line instead of understanding the path.

Today, we’re all becoming children of the magenta.

We follow algorithmic recommendations without understanding their logic. We trust GPS over our sense of direction. We prompt AI to write emails we could compose ourselves. Increasingly, we’re automating our thinking and always striving to operate at the highest level of automation even when the situation would call for human judgment.

This isn’t new; we made jokes about it decades ago.

Now, however, entire organizations dream of offloading their complexity - complexity they never understood to begin with - to “agentic” AI systems, explicitly pursuing ever-higher levels of automation as if it were inherently virtuous.

Just like before, the danger isn’t the automation itself. It’s the potential atrophy of underlying skills and judgment before the automation is actually capable of replacing them; Capt. Vanderburgh called this losing “technology judgment,” the ability to know which level of automation fits the task at hand.

You probably don’t sweat too much about the risks of flying. That’s because you don’t need to - the safety of the modern aviation system is a remarkable feat of our civilization. Through better training, crew resource management, and a culture that values both automation and manual skills, the industry has continued its remarkable safety improvement even as planes became more complex.

It is my hope that we can, for once, apply the hard-won lessons to other domains of automation.

The transition to an automated society doesn’t have to mean surrendering our agency or autonomy; it should not have to mean abandoning our mastery either, let alone purpose. Yet all are being threatened.

Sometimes, instead of looking down and trying to manage the system, you just need to look out the window and fly the airplane.

Loosely speaking, how we do that is what Children of the Magenta is about.

Ps. This will also be a new home for my book reviews that used to live primarily on LinkedIn, but I want to distance myself from that platform as its enshittification continues.