Maha, you have brought up an interesting co-relation: automating something = not caring about it enough to do it manually/emotionally/thoughtfully by ourselves.
I think about this a lot and go back and forth between the truth in that. There are a lot of analogies from tech advances in the past that come to mind: simple calculators, scientific calculators, computer programs to do complex calculations, coding manually, versus using visual coding apps. etc.
I also can’t help but think about the difference between the use of “automating” something and “outsourcing” something. So, for example, my sister who lives in India, is a great cook, but she is also a new mom, and a Team Lead in an MNC overseeing a team of over 35 people. She employs a cook to outsource cooking daily meals, so her time can be better used to juggle her 9 month old baby and her very busy job. In this case, if she tried to do everything by herself (without outsourcing), it’d deplete her to the extent of not being able to be a good/present mother and/or a great employee/team lead.
Picoting a bit, my main thought is this: at some point, we really need to think about how/why we moralize making things easier for us and equate that with not caring, not doing our jobs well, plain laziness, or even feeling guilty about not doing everything by ourselves. Why is all this tech not helping us free up more time and create more leisure for Us? Us as educators, us as students, us as workers, us as parents, us as inventors of this same tech. After all, isn’t that the ultimate goal? To have more leisure time?
In any case, thank you for penning down something that moved me to think more and even write about it. I love how much you care and how passionate you are about educating in the constantly changing tech-scape of our increasingly global world today.