snip
More like no need
The staggering amount of memorization
was pretty impressive, but, y'know. Both you and me have gigantic chunks of the entirety of humanity's collective intellectual and cultural efforts at our fingertips, now. The bards were impressive, no doubt, no argument; our external storage (print/digital mediums, etc., etc.) is orders of magnitude more so, and available to significantly more people to boot. It's not that humanity has declined (though it's definitely changed a bit, sure, perhaps even notably to adapt old biological systems to new tools), it's that the machines are just... better at what they do, at least in a lot of areas. They
do come with problems, but the consistent picture I, at least, have seen is that we almost always take those problems over the ones they're replacing for tremendously good reasons. Even at our best -- and we're very much aware of those limits, both past and current, and that those'll only change with bloody genetic engineering any time soon -- we're kinda' only so-so at a lot of things, and only so
many of us are particularly capable of
being that best, thanks to how much biology and genetics loves to screw us. Machines trend towards being a lot more consistent, even when they're inconsistent.
Though yeah, be fine with holding companies accountable for not keeping an eye on the software they're using, or something along those lines. That's
badly needed, in all honesty, both for the company using it and whoever
made it. Give us a legal incentive to make sure our shit is working, yeah?* And substantiative recourse for those impacted when it doesn't, not the teeth-pulling bullshit that characterizes everything, computer related or not, we have now. Those kinds of software are just as, if not even more, important as that basic spreadsheet and database software, but if the companies are allowed to be lazy with 'em, they'll go back to being barely any better than the years previous, and bugger
that with a cactus. We're not
just doing this to save time, damnit.
*Maybe not necessarily punitive if it's found that the error is, in fact, error and not deliberately skimping on paying attention, but as per cases noted, if it's causing all sorts of irritation and distress, even if it's being made with conceptual best intentions (i.e. following the information the company had at hand), there should be some of renumeration involved. And exempt FOSS projects, of course -- let burden fall solely on the company in those cases.