From my perspective (as a part-time industrial controls engineer and full-time robotic application engineer) by requiring a finger to touch a keypad to make something move is the human initiating the motion aka "manual operation". The human pushes a button, the board comes up, human pushes another button, the board rakes to the side, button push and wing eases out, etc. If, however, Ashby just taps a button that fires off a series of mechanical motions on the boat to, perhaps, move all the foils through an entire tacking series, or the boat can be put into a mode where it reads it's flight height and automatically adjusts the foils to maintain level flight, that is the computer initiating motion in an automatic mode. I suspect the later is not AC legal.

Again, though, I don't know the details of how this plays out in the rules - just pointing out what industrial applications of control systems consider human vs. machine controlled.