[Archer6621]

That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job.

In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.