Taken from the article:

A hundred years ago, the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” It’s hard to imagine a more confident expression of faith in automation. Implicit in Whitehead’s words is a belief in a hierarchy of human activities: Every time we off-load a job to a tool or a machine, we free ourselves to climb to a higher pursuit, one requiring greater dexterity, deeper intelligence, or a broader perspective. We may lose something with each upward step, but what we gain is, in the long run, far greater.

This is exactly why we are where we are today.