Automation Dependency

In light of the Asiana Airlines crash at SFO, many articles and newscasts are discussing the dependency of pilots to use automated systems to fly and land an airplane, instead of an 'old-fashioned' visual/manual method. In this fully automated world, that applies to far more than just flying an airplane. It is getting to the point where we have to ask ourselves: Are we better off with technology, or not? Who writes a letter anymore? Blogger.com is blocked on my computer at work, so I'd hand write out a blog post, but due to not writing for years, my penmanship sucked! So now I just type my blog in an email to myself, and copy and paste it to my blog page when I get home. When you go to a meeting at work, does anyone takes notes with a pen and paper? I'm sure it's few and far between since most people type notes on their iPad or laptop. I used to know hundreds of phone numbers by heart. People were impressed with how many numbers I knew. But I only know a few now because I simply pick up my phone and tell it who to call. I don't even have to dial the number. We're losing our ability to do things on our own. We need to find a happy medium between manual processes and technological evolution. If we allow machines to think for us, how long will it be before we can no longer think on our own? Are we making ourselves irrelevant? Maybe this is how the world ends--no huge cataclysmic disaster, no new ice age or dinosaurs--we just simply phase ourselves out. In evolution theories, we came from animals with tails, but since we didn't use them, they became unnecessary and disappeared. What's next?