What should be automated?

What should be automated asked PhD Tedre in his article published in Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Human-centered multimedia.

Now, I'm asking how you should tell the user about the automation? Why? I tell you.

As you might know, we use this daylight saving time in Finland and that we changed to this time this year during the night between 28th and 29th of March. Naturally, this means that some of the clocks need to be changed manually to new time, and some, such as computers usually change the time automatically.

The problem with this is that you really don't know what devices change their time automatically and which dont. My wife changed her mobile phones time by herself on saturday evening. Everything fine, until this morning (Monday, March 30th). Her alarm, yes the mobile phone, went on at 5.50 instead of 6.50. Why? Because of the automated change. She had added one hour to the time on Saturday (would have caused alarm to go on at 6.50, which would have been ok) and then, at the right time, the automation did it again which, then, caused the infernal 5.50 alarm.

Thus. What should be automated is a really relevant question, but even more relavant is to let the user know what is automated. How this could be done, is a question I leave some else to answer.