[GreymanTheGrey]

As another programmer, and one with decades of experience building software running critical infrastructure, I have a very different view.

You seem to be expecting perfection, or a reasonable facsimile of it, but that's not the bar that's being set by the existing solution (people).

Using your example of even a pedestrian task such as buying airline tickets, humans generally have a worse error rate than a computer doing it.

Source: I live in the Philippines where manual handling is still de rigeur for everything from buying ferry tickets, to immigration paperwork, to car registration and driving licenses. The error rate is far, far higher than the automated systems that do these things in other countries.

Similarly, humans (in aggregate) are really not very good at driving cars safely. Software on the other hand, is only getting better at it as time goes on. It's perhaps debatable whether computers are currently better (again, in aggregate) than humans, but with the current state of the art my view is that they are.

I'd welcome these things with open arms in the Philippines compared to the average driver on the road. Or equally so in my home country of Australia, or the US, or anywhere where humans kill each other every day in fast-moving steel cages.