We can't have a discussion about the human factors in automated systems without talking about Sidney Dekker's book The Field Guide To Understand Human Error:
http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error/...
Fantastic read about the futility of placing blame on a single human in a catastrophe like this. It makes a strong case for why more automation often causes more work. Definitely worth checking out, Etsy has applied it to their engineering work by using it to facilitate blameless post mortems: