Are We Going To Become Village Idiots?

I was working away on my laptop with the TV droning on in the background. I wasn't really paying attention to the furniture store commercial that came on. 

Until I heard: "And the lid of the compartment between the sectional seating automatically closes."

And then for some reason it had my full attention.

Pretty innocuous stuff, you might be thinking. But wait a minute.

In this day of automation and vast technology and smart everything, do we really also need a sectional with a built-in compartment that has a lid that closes on its own? 

Are we soon going to become a world of "dumbed-down" fools that forget everything we've ever learned because automation now does it for us? 

This obviously stuck in my craw.

I'm already worried that my grandson is growing up in an age of such technological development that he may never learn how to actually talk on a phone. Why should he when he can text?

Will he learn how to sign his name to a check? Oh yeah, he probably won't ever use a check. But if he ever actually needs to sign his name, will he have been taught cursive writing in school?  

Will he be adept at spelling? I mean, texting is all about abbreviated words without the vowels, isn't it? Will he learn how to type actual words?

Are we growing a world of village idiots? 

I know that I'm old school about a lot of things. I guess that's what happens after you hit a certain age. 

I remember reading George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, (or 1984). His vivid imagination churned out a book, born of misery and grief, that had us thinking about a dystopian world. A time far beyond what we could imagine. 

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (First line in the book)

But the actual year 1984 seemed a long way away when I graduated from high school in 1975. And then it came and went and years passed, and we are now past the middle mark of 2017.

I just don't think, even as imaginative as I happen to be, that I ever could have conjured up the world we live in now. 

I'm showing my age here, but I grew up using a refrigerator that did not automatically make ice cubes. (However it is compelling to add here that I grew up calling refrigerators ice boxes.)

Ice trays went to the local landfill and automation created perfectly shaped ice cubes. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven. Ovens magically cleaned themselves. And so it went.

Don't get me wrong, I love technology and computers and the internet. It is a vast playground for me. But really, can't automatic everything go a bit too far?

Who on earth needs a compartment lid between sectional seats to automatically close?

Do we need to pay more for something we could easily close on our own? It only takes a second to do. So is it going to be the reason we buy a sectional? 

I'd love to read your thoughts on this matter. But first let me go empty my ice cube tray so I can fix myself a glass of sweet tea.