> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile.

We could do this forever.

the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp

ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes

I think there's a fallacy where someone points out one instance of a larger trend which will, when taken to its logical progression, lead to an undesired effect; and then someone attempts to rebut the claim by pointing out that the trend has existed before and the undesired effect hasn't happened yet, so any concern is nugatory. I'd call it the grippery slope fallacy, complement to the slippery one: we haven't fallen down the slope yet, so we can't fall down it. What if an individual instance of ignorance is acceptable because people still need to have understanding in other areas, but if all understanding everywhere is eliminated then we all suffer?

Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.

I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.

Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.

This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.

You mean as a distraction from the point being made?

No. No economy ever had essentially every single major company spending a significant fraction of its budget on hiring auto mechanics. Which is to say, for all the changes the automobile wrought, the role of the computer in industrialized society eclipses it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. For an individual in many modern societies, being denied access to a car is already effectively crippling, and the idea of being denied access to computation threatens to be somehow even worse.

A person dies every 26 seconds in a road traffic incident somewhere in the world. A big part of that is people using machines they do not understand.