Taking the long view, we can see that our attempts to remove all of our activities from the manual to the mechanical and then to the automatic indiscriminately may be quite wrong …

To quote Bob Malone on this: is the automatic gear shift then a true advance in humane design or not? Since it tends to remove man from a basic and relatively simple use of his motor responses, rather than to simplify and integrate the processes, we can see that the validity of the automatic gear shift is illusory. When a true need or desire is satisfied for a passive human being without effort, the result is not gratification, but rather a more complex level of dissatisfaction.