Automation Makes the Unmotivated Dumber

I recently saw an article come across my Twitter feed by Nicholas Carr on the Wall Street Journal online that I couldn’t disagree with more. The article was entitled Automation Makes Us Dumb. Based solely on the title you can see how this article and my philosophy could easily conflict. I urge you to read the article in its entirety and come back here after you’ve done so.

Let me start by saying automation does not make “us” dumb. It makes us dumb. Automation takes our plane of knowledge to a different level altogether. Computers take care of the minutiae. We don’t walk behind a horse-drawn plow anymore because we have tractors and I don’t hear anyone complaining about that!

The “dumb” ones either are incapable of thinking at a different level or might be just lazy. They succumb to “button pushing” and become an assistant to the computer; not the master. This isn’t automation’s fault; quite the contrary.

It’s the fault of the human that refuses to embrace change and to see that technology is where things are headed. Automation saves us, humans, time and produces a much more reliable and consistent output.

Humans are inherently messy with tasks. We forget things and just do things wrong even when we’ve done the exact same task 100 times before. A computer does not. It’s either 100% wrong or 100%…