Tautology yes - pointless - perhaps not. It points out that there are many things which are automatable, but that the capability to automate things cannot be t

Tautology yes - pointless - perhaps not. It points out that there are many things which are automatable, but that the capability to automate things cannot be the decision driver of whether things should be automated. At one end of the scale, ATMs replacing some bank tellers seems to have been widely accepted as OK. In the middle, self serve supermarket checkouts (here in .au at least) are saving staff costs for the supermarkets with the side effect of pushing shoplifting prevention and enforcement costs off to the local police instead of supermarket staff, which is not such a great automation outcome (unless you're the manager who got the bonus for reducing headcount costs at the supermarket). At the end alluded to in the discussion of this article, I think it's pretty clear that attempts to automate discipline of children is an abhorrent idea.