For me, my interest in human editing vs computer editing arose when I was in High School.
I was doing a 25 page paper on Emperor Justinian 1 (
Justinian I - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) on my trusty Apple IIe, and I was still the kind of person who backed up my active files every 10 minutes or so. I had just finished the typing the thing and saved it, then began my final proofread before printing, binding and bedtime.
Disaster.
At some point during the final save, some gremlin replaced every letter "j" in the paper- uppercase and lowercase- with a rune-like symbol. (And no, its not one I can reproduce using "alt" keys or the like.)
And worst of all, I couldn't replace them- the letter "j" was suddenly not part of the computer's vocabulary- hit the "j" key, get the squiggle.
I had to re-read that paper word-by-word- really, letter-by-letter- to find all instances of the letter "j" and replace the word with a synonym. "Justinian" became "The Emperor;" "Corpus Juris Civilis" became "Roman Law;" "enjoy" became "appreciate" and so forth.
I finished at about 6:50 AM, took a shower and went to school...
Blessed be my parents who called ahead of time and explained to the prof and the Headmaster what happened. The prof met me on the stairs and sent me home.
And in the years I had that machine, it
never did anything like that again. (Though a buddy of mine
did accidentally set one of its floppy drives on fire...but that wasn't the computer's fault.)