Is Automation Always Better?

"Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth," wrote Jules Verne. I've been in the field of automation long enough to see that many of the most impressive advancements are still quite new. Take driverless cars, for instance. A decade ago, they were little more than a fantasy, but in February 2019, Elon Musk predicted that we'd have the technology for a fully self-driving car by the end of this year. Driverless cars promise to transform transportation, but something like machine learning promises to transform everything.