I used to manage a team that did automatic analysis of all the incoming ads at a major tech company for stuff like smut, gambling, etc.
Eng had a pretty amazing system set up create an n-million dimensional vector out of each landing page and would run a process overnight to cluster them and find the ones that landed next to our corpus of tagged ones. Millions of pages per day, amazing stuff.
So yeah I've seen the power of automated classification systems first hand, I have gotten bonuses for allowing that company to "reassign" people who had been working on manual classifications.
I can imagine that systems similar to that is very useful in medical diagnosis. What's different now is that half the engineers and all the managers think the machine is the genie from _Aladdin_, and I don't think that delusion is separable from how work actually gets done anywhere now.
