As we ever seek to simplify our lives to attain the freedom to live lives of leisure, I wonder whether that is really the utopia we think it is. Skills atrophy is rife in society and as automation becomes our god, we must question the cost to ourselves. Are we blithely passing on those skills that others before us have striven and fought to attain, with their precious years?

Perhaps there will come a point at which we have eroded so much of what makes us human that in effect we will regress into a a strange and empty neo-Cro-Magnon.