Automation, a curse or a blessing?

Like the god Thoth in Plato, the inventor of the pocket calculator will undoubtedly think that he has done humanity a great service. And I must admit that using a pocket calculator is more efficient than browsing through a table of logarithms, which used to be the fashion in my high-school days. Furthermore it must be admitted that a table of logarithms hardly fitted inside your breast pocket. However, King Thamos of Egypt is right again when he says that such an invention stimulates ignorance. How many people possess a pocket calculator, but haven’t got the slightest notion of the calculating processes? Analogous to that, one can see the same in business automation, where users hardly have any idea of what the computer actually does.

Pocket calculators should in fact only be issued to people who have sufficient notion of the plausibility of what the machine is doing. By notion of the plausibility, we mean that when giving the entries and the instruction, the user should have an idea of what the outcome should be.