I see it as a sort of mirror to the thinking of our time. They see a way to put a human in control of something that was computer-controlled, and think that it

I see it as a sort of mirror to the thinking of our time. They see a way to put a human in control of something that was computer-controlled, and think that it will be better, despite the fact that their human computation can only do a tiny amount of the computation a computer can do. Nowadays, we see a way to automate something a person does, and think that it'd better that way, despite a human mind being capable of much more than what a computer is capable of. The point of the story as I read it is that the power of new technologies can be illusory.