I think checklists are helpful for training purposes, but at the end of the day humans aren't machines and probably aren't going to think in terms of checklists

I think checklists are helpful for training purposes, but at the end of the day humans aren't machines and probably aren't going to think in terms of checklists and many people are going to blank out at following complicated steps for too long. Think about the medical industry and how medical errors are the source of so many deaths despite there being checklists (I believe) in the job and in training. What I think is helpful for automation are basic sanity checks: are the values in the ballpark of reasonable and common? If you're doing some financial data entry tasks for example, automation could help quickly find big errors: accidentally putting 999 in an entry field where the maximum is commonly around 99. An automated system could call out exceptional values for human review if it's too far from the expected value. > For example, could most checklists used by pilots be automated? I don't know enough about piloting to say definitively, but I'd say that I'd rather fly on a plane that also had an experienced human pilot trying to find anything that seems out of the ordinary, say a weird stain on the wing that merits closer investigation that a computer might not even be programmed to think about. Human judgement can't be beat, especially if a situation hasn't been encountered before.