Small Problems

I understand the push for companies to automate as much as possible; they're looking to keep their costs as low as possible, and having people do things can be expensive. Sure, eventually companies run the risk that automation is in such widespread use that their customers find themselves out of work (or stuck with poorly-paying service jobs) and can't afford their products and services, but that's a problem for future CEOs.

The problem that high degrees of automation bring now is that it's not infallible, and if there are few to no people around, there's no-one there to catch mistakes, like this one:

I'm not sure how this was classified as a Technology story; there are any number of places along the way where that could have happened. And, because Age of Sigmar is a niche within the greater niche of Warhammer tabletop fantasy wargaming, it's unlikely that most of the people who scrolled past this set of stories realized that it was misplaced.

But these are the sorts of admittedly minor errors that erode people's trust in technology; because if there are problems in areas that one knows something about, might there not also be errors in areas where one doesn't have firsthand knowledge? In this sense, it's similar to "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy," which can be understood to be a reason behind a general distrust of media stories.

The answer from Google News would likely be that their classifications of stories are accurate enough... it's not like the categorizations are done at random, or anything. And that's likely true. But there's still a problem with not knowing if novel information is accurate that prevents these sorts of automated systems from being trusted sources in the way they were intended to be.