In automation, the essential question is how much human effort the automation saves in comparison to the requirements of the automation technology.

Mere laziness does not justify automation: modern households are full of devices that save relatively little time but waste a lot of energy. Automation is at its best at continuous and repetitive tasks that require a lot of time and/or effort from humans but only a neglectable amount of resources from a programmable device.

Permaculture wants to develop systems where nature does most of the work, and humans mostly do things like maintenance, design and building. A good place for computerized automation would therefore be somewhere between natural processes and human labor.