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This commentary is inspired by two recent articles in the journal Ergonomics that seem to call in question the purposes and necessity of our discipline of human factors and ergonomics (HF/E). I would like to counter with the argument that there is nothing new under the sun, that the operating environment of HF/E has not changed since foundation of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) in 1957, and that we, as members of HFES and researchers and practitioners of HF/E, have much to contribute as advocates for humans in the increasingly technological society. This, however, will require refocusing our mission tohuman(emphasis added) factors, away from technique. Three areas in particular should be addressed: Research methods to keep up with developments in artificial intelligence, policy and advocacy, and broader perspectives to include also philosophical questions about human flourishing and ultimate purpose. 

There has been much relevant research on future human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) professionals’ and their employers’ shifting expectations and changing university curricula. Both ever-evolving technology and the dynamics of workplaces mean that this work is never complete, and a gap between education and industry preparedness remains a persistent problem. A current trend in U.S. colleges is increasing curricular flexibility, with many elective courses students may take toward their degrees. This research expanded an earlier project to automate the review of university course catalogs for relevant courses students in any major could take as electives and thus help expand the education of future professionals beyond formal HF/E degree programs. We also surveyed of HF/E professionals in the industry who are in a position to recruit, hire, or supervise new human factors professionals and asked them to assess the most important knowledge, skills, and abilities college graduates entering the HF/E profession. 

This research investigated human performance in response to task demands that may be used to convey information about the human to an artificial agent. We performed an experiment with a dynamic time-sharing task to investigate participants development of temporal awareness of the task event unfolding in time. Temporal awareness as an extension, or a special case, of situation awareness, may provide for useful measures of covert mental models applicable to numerous tasks and for input to human-aware AI agents. Temporal awareness measures may be used to classify human performance into the control modes in the contextual control model (COCOM): scrambled, opportunistic, tactical, and strategic. Twenty-one participants participated in a within subjects experiment with an abstract task of resetting four independent timers within their respective windows of opportunity. The results show that temporal measures of task performance are sensitive to changes in task disruptions and difficulty and therefore have promise for human-aware AI.