First of all he said little by little so calling it rapid is a bit misleading. Second this was not ultimately a hardware/software failure but the failure of the overall supervisor of the system(= pilot). We can't (yet) make hardwares that are immune to failure but we have redundancy and procedures to deal with these failures. It seems like in this case the procedures were not properly executed which lead to the tragedy. To also address @lmm's point: the leading cause for aircraft accidents are human error and not hardware/software failure so more automation = less accidents. Edit: after reading some more on the subject it seems like boeing share some of the blame for not including the new system(or system changes) in their training program which is again a human error.

Is pilot error more or less of a cause of fatal aircraft incidents than automation gone awry? What does the data say?

The FAA thinks that cockpit automation leads to complacency. It's a question on the commercial pilot written test.

There's a talk on youtube (Children of Magenta, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10) given to an audience of pilots, it's a complicated issue.