I think that in a product-centric or mission-centric perspective, effective automation is good, because it frees you up to do other important things. E.g., in gardening, time spent weeding, is time not spent surviving slug armageddon.

You can tell what kind of discussion this is by the fact that this question has to be asked.

I like imagining similar discourse when a more basic tool was invented: "A hammer is like a genie, it's all powerful, but, when you hit something with it, it interprets that super-literally, and it hits it."