I agree with the main point of the article. Automation is a good thing. Freeing up time for more useful tasks is clearly a good thing for morale and efficiency.

One thing that these tools will often lead to though, is a dulling of your core skills and situational awareness. In a previous life as a flying instructor, I had many students wanting to use their brand new Garmin Sat Navs or asking me why we couldn't switch on the other radio navigation instruments or the auto-pilot (they are available for a reason after all). These tools are amazing, not only giving you your horizontal coordinates, but also giving you your vertical position, endurance information, calculating your track, ground speed, ETA and many things besides. These are all things that pilots of light aircraft traditionally do using a combination of their brain and their MK1 eyeball. They probably take up the majority of the pilot's workload in the cockpit (and 99% of their mental capacity) so they are perfect tasks for automation.

My answer to students would always be the same. Apart from the usual "what if the batteries run out" argument (a very valid point), the more important point for me is that if you want to be a good pilot, you need to understand for yourself what the plane is doing. Don't rely on a tool just spitting out numbers and take it as gospel. You need to know the significance of all the factors that have gone into the calculation. If you know these, your brain will alert you to a problem far sooner than a GPS notification message. Lastly, abdicating your decision making puts you out of the loop, so that when a change of plan is required (emergency or otherwise), you've lost the bigger picture. Automation should enforce your decision making, rather than replace it.

This long analogy applies equally to IT. Whilst the tools are great, if you don't invest the time to step through tasks for yourself and understand what they are doing, and why, there will be a time (usually when the batteries run out 😉 ) when you need to change something and will be at the mercy of circumstances you're not aware of.

Cheers

Frank