AFAIK some fields distinguish "Pilot error", caused by someone's skill as a pilot, and "Human error", caused by the fact that you are not made of silicon. You

AFAIK some fields distinguish "Pilot error", caused by someone's skill as a pilot, and "Human error", caused by the fact that you are not made of silicon. You can't prevent all error just by manipulating the inputs. For one thing, you can't fully control all the inputs. Human error is a useful approximation because it basically says people are unreliable, and will probably be so for life. The point isn't to blame individuals, but to built systems that are resistant to errors, and do not have behavioral single points of failure where one action can make a mess you can't easily fix. Most of society is really deep in a "Shit happens, move on" mindset, and their solution to any human error is usually "Be more careful", which often becomes fairly meaningless, as one often can't slow down or reduce distractions. In more reliability focused thinking, the response to human error might be to specifically train for avoiding that mistake, if you think you can, to remove the preconditions of the mistake, to add checklist procedures, or to remove the ability of the mistake to cause harm. The study of human error has been incredibly important in my life. As of yet, nobody has been able to teach me how to stop making mistakes, day in, and day out. But I can often predict them, sometimes prevent them, and usually mitigate them, by modeling them as background noise that's just always there, like as if my intentions and my actual thoughts were on opposite ends of a noisy dial up link.