I take your point. However I do think the 'automation' process you described sounds like automated feature selection or the general idea of regression. 'A fata

I take your point. However I do think the 'automation' process you described sounds like automated feature selection or the general idea of regression. 'A fatal issue is then that the datasets we are asking to be automatically aproximated are radically incomplete,' I couldn't agree more with that. For example, in my field of research a hypothesis is formed and can only be evaluated through a set of genomic profilings and clinical assessments. However no ML methods in the world could tell us whether these evidence are adequate to figure out the causal factors or there is any relevance of the dataset at all. Comparing with your self-driving car example, the error in the system and the cause are at least human-interpretable. That being said, it is a common theme in research and publications most people are aware of these caveats and limitations.