Personally, I think its worse than that...

A few days ago I was at a convenience store picking up a few essentials. My total came to $10.47 and I handed the young lady a $20 dollar bill. Unfortunately, their cash register was not working properly and the young lady had to make change "in her head".

It was amazing to watch this young person standing there completely frozen, unable to calculate how much change I was due. A couple of times she politely apologized, but it was clear she had NO clue how to figure out how much change I was due. At one point she handed me $20 and 3 cents, and then mumbled "no no, thats not right..."

I couldn't stand it any longer - I was not angry, I was saddened to see her so befuddled. Finally I said to her, "Start from 10.47 and count as you take change, up to 20 dollars." She managed to work that out and then smiled a huge smile at me and said "Wow! Thats a great trick!!!" I thought, yeah, like I should get a Nobel prize for that one...

More than "us" needing human judgement, in many cases, such as this one I experienced (and not for the first time), computers are to some degree helping to "dumb-down" our youth and society in general. There are a number of futurists who have written about this and painted pictures of a coming "Idiocracy" where humans back-peddle so far in basic knowledge that we become "slaves" to machines - not like in the "Terminator" movies, but simply because we lose the ability to think for ourselves.

Yes, we still need human judgement - but what happens when that human judgement is so watered-down and dependant on machines thats its useless? Maybe our doom lies not in disasters, asteroids, or super-viruses - maybe it lies in our own concerted efforts to be, well, stupid.