Recent technologies like ChatGPT inspire ideas of increasing automation for professional tasks in various domains. This includes among others requirements engineering. So far, however, the divide between useful and harmful automation has been blurry and in flux. In this keynote, I will discuss foundational concepts with which automation has been analyzed. Using these concepts, I will discuss the opportunities arising for requirements engineering from the advent of natural language processing, image processing, and event sequence analysis techniques. Furthermore, I will discuss important pitfalls that have been well documented for other automation technologies in the past.