The Cybernetic Lullaby, Part Ii

I read on my laptop today-- automation is making us dumber, ineffective, maybe even impotent. Perhaps it's a conspiracy by that secret society, the computer brotherhood. (Do you really believe your Apple is innocent, and IBM is not plotting?) Or maybe we should just blame human sloth, that siren call of sheer damn laziness which can lure the best of us to a quiet doom. A simple proof: hand a twenty to a clerk and ask him to make change without looking to the machine for succor. That blank innocent look he gives you-- "Why me?" he seems to be saying, and you can't help but pity him a bit. He is, after all, a victim of mass education. There are worse victims: airliners wildly crashing, doctors killing their patients, nuclear power plants going BOOM! and killing the land for an eon or two, or three. How like little children we were! Thinking these machines would be our slaves, sans the brutality. But it is we who are chained by the zeros and ones, we who are thinking less, creating cheaper, settling into a cybernetic fog.