I work in accounting and have been "automating" different boring tasks using Python. And, naturally, I've been thinking about ever increasing levels of automati

I work in accounting and have been "automating" different boring tasks using Python. And, naturally, I've been thinking about ever increasing levels of automation. Always on a read-only basis. But in the back of my mind, I'm also thinking about data entry. So, I have a personal interest in the topic. The basis of the article, the 1983 article, makes this reversal of expectation claim: _"Perhaps the final irony is that it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training."_ This seems archaic to me, and doesn't connect (not sage advice from the past)... If you automate a really boring task, you can eliminate errors, and improve operator efficiency: don't need to perform the boring sub-tasks. For example, generating reports in Excel you may need to write VLOOKUPs, which is in itself learning yet another "tool". When you're using Python scripts to process data, you can simply learn to execute the script (which is in itself a basic skill you can apply to many more tasks). The next level of automation is accessing data from diverse systems without the operator: pulling the report from third-party, doing some analysis, and finally sending the report. I think of the first kind of automation like a manufacturing machine or a tractor. Early steam engines were stationary processing engines. The next level was putting wheels on the engine and taking it into a field (complex environment) and try to keep it running. I don't see any reversal of expectation in "automation" here. I expect the tractor will run until some part of the vehicle fails (in my script--until an update borks a module dependency). I'm always concerned about the "complex environment" being too complex for my economical attempts at automation. Finally, I have to walk the field to see the tractor did it's job, which is not the same as thinking about tractor maintenance and operation. I think the 1983 write was pensive about the future. But their future is my present, and I have things to do which are effective.