Designer Tey Bannerman writes that when he hears “human in the loop,” he’s reminded of a story about Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet Union duty watch officer who monitored for incoming missile strikes from the US.
12:15 AM… the unthinkable. Every alarm in the facility started screaming. The screens showed five US ballistic missiles, 28 minutes from impact. Confidence level: 100%. Petrov had minutes to decide whether to trigger a chain reaction that would start nuclear war and could very well end civilisation as we knew it.
He was the “human in the loop” in the most literal, terrifying sense.
Everything told him to follow protocol. His training. His commanders. The computers.
But something felt wrong. His intuition, built from years of intelligence work, whispered that this didn’t match what he knew about US strategic thinking.
Against every protocol, against the screaming certainty of technology, he pressed the button marked “false alarm”.
Twenty-three minutes of gripping fear passed before ground radar confirmed: no missiles. The system had mistaken a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds for incoming warheads.
His decision to break the loop prevented nuclear war.
Then Bannerman shares an awesome framework he developed that allows humans in the loop in AI systems “genuine authority, time to think, and understanding the bigger picture well enough to question” the system’s decision. Click on to get the PDF from his site.
