Once men turned their thinking over to machines in hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
-Reverend Mother in Frank Herbert's Dune
While the statement is in the past for the fictitious year in which it is uttered, we are not yet at the stage where we have realized that trying to mechanize everything is not the answer to (life, universe and ) everything. It will work up to an extent, but not beyond a certain point.
Turing test, Godel's theorem all seem to be screaming at us that there is more to this world than pure logic (that does NOT mean it is emotion!). Things like identity thefts are but the tip of an iceberg. The spiraling wave of better encryption and more intelligent hacking will keep escalating until more non-mechanistic (fuzzy? probabilistic?) steps get incorporated. As our dependence on machines grows, we will start having to do everything in C++ in stead of Perl i.e. declare everything, make it strongly typed and completely non-intuitive. Human thinking will get encased in narrow dimensions.
That also reminds of what Arno Penzias, the Nobel Laurette once said: If you do not want to be replaced by a machine, do not act like one. One's mentality does get narrowed down to thinking down to the level of machines (but not at their speed) and gets frozen there.
Every now and then do random acts (of kindness). Try not to live a life that is run by the clock (among other machines).
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