I’m used to seeing my feeds (especially LinkedIn) full of “automate everything” nonsense posts in the field of testing. This stream of misinformation seems to be flowing ever faster as more and more folks jump on the AI bandwagon, whether it’s in “testing tools leveraging AI” or the use of LLM models such as ChatGPT to reduce or remove the need for those pesky human elements of testing.
It’s less common to see this “automate everything” mantra in the mainstream news, so I was somewhat surprised to read an article in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper recently, titled “ASIC wants to ‘intelligently automate’ everything. Experts aren’t sure that will work” and written by Charlotte Grieve.
She writes:
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has listed “intelligently automate everything we do” as one of five principles of its internal digital strategy, according to documents obtained by this masthead [The Age] under freedom of information laws.
One of ASIC’s key roles is to investigate reports of serious misconduct and its existing use of automation in this regard has already been criticized:
The use of automation within ASIC garnered controversy earlier this year after liquidators claimed reports of serious corporate misconduct were dismissed in as little as 38 seconds, allowing thousands of company directors to avoid scrutiny over five years.
The article goes on to quote Helen Bird, part of ASIC’s corporate governance panel:
Bird … warned the technology behind automation and AI was not ready for wide deployment within the regulator.
Bird said it was inevitable that AI would eventually be used across all regulators because of the significant cost-saving opportunities from removing time-consuming manual tasks and reducing or redeploying staff.
It was only a matter of time before “manual” entered the narrative here, just like when reading the automation versus “manual” testing posts littering my feed every day. Despite the problems already identified with trying to automate the difficult task of investigating financial misconduct, in this case the regulator seems intent to go further down the automation and AI path – but maybe we can take solace in the fact that at least they’ll be doing it “intellgently”. Ironically:
Earlier this year, [ASIC chair] Longo warned traders and investment banks against rushing to use artificial intelligence technology. He said inappropriate use of AI could create “unintended consequences” if adopted without proper controls and governance.
It’ll be interesting to see how ASIC’s journey to “intelligently automate everything” pans out. In the meantime, in case there’s any confusion about whether software testing can be completely automated, I’ve covered this topic in a previous blog post, Common search engine questions about testing #5: “Can you automate software testing?”
(Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash)
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