[542458]

They can. Most software (MS Word) will just use kerning pairs predefined in the font, but more complex design software (Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, for example) can automatically optically kern text - it works pretty dang well.

Maybe I'm not picky enough as a designer, but I only very rarely kern something by hand, and that's usually when I'm working with some weird display font that auto kern doesn't handle well and has poorly defined kern pairs. Sometimes logos as well, but for 99% of text it's really not worth the trouble IMHO.

[kazinator]

You're probably not gonna kern by hand anything that isn't an attention grabber in a huge font, or a logo or product label, and the like.