As a former trader/developer/quant I often felt that "automating myself out of a job" was my goal. If we could build properly architected systems that were self-healing when things went wrong, turned themselves on before the market opened, traded all day, made money and shut down for the night... then eventually my role would devolve into monitoring and ultimately into nothing...

In practise, achieving some sort of "steady state" or status-quo doesn't work for a few reasons:

1. Inherent system complexity ensures something always breaks. Human attention is always needed.

2. Markets evolve rapidly due to technology changes, regulatory changes and the very nature of markets: Strategies and ideas that worked in the past cease to work in the future.