Steem automation is possible in many ways, but as you mentioned, we will never know what is created by the person we upvote, Trust and integrity is important here. The #newsteem forced the bots to get into manual curation. Everyone would love to sit back and get paid automatically, but the entire ecosystem will be bunch of bots communicating with each other without any emotional understanding about the topic, that definitely does not make sense. Someone might even create a keyword based bots (a virus/bug) that will curate disastrous fake news and currently that is the biggest problem across social media platforms.