[electic]

> Will happily flood the house if something goes wrong.

It isn't supposed to flood the house. It is designed to be automatic. Meaning no supervision. Tesla's Autopilot isn't designed this way yet carries the name.

Let's keep going.

> Will happily send your life savings to the power company if they typo a couple of extra zeroes on your bill.

This has nothing to do with automatic payment being poorly designed. It is designed to pay the balance without your intervention...hence automatic.

> Notorious for massive screwups when people enable them without adequate controls, especially when multiple people on the same mailing list do it at the same time.

Depends on how it is implemented. There are usually more knobs to this feature and it is designed to have you program it. Based on programming, settings, etc, it will do whatever you set it to without you having to be there...hence automatic reply.

[mikeash]

I'm not saying automatic bill pay is poorly designed, I'm saying it requires supervision to make sure it doesn't do anything stupid. We don't expect "autopay" to be foolproof, we expect it to handle the mundane stuff.

[electic]

It is designed to be foolproof. It alerts you when banking details fail. It alerts when it makes a payment. The system also sends you a bill email before it even makes a payment a few weeks before in case you want to dispute charges. The system however is to pay bills, and when configured correctly, it does it without you having to intervene at all. Not sure why automatic bill pay requires humans to get involved.

Your bill and the automatic bill pay system are two different concerns here.

[mikeash]

If it was designed to be foolproof, they wouldn't bother sending you emails before they make payments.

It works fine when the situation is good, and it can fail when it encounters troublesome situations in the real world. Since it operates in the real world, it needs some monitoring.