I expect that some day we will be more like George Jetson and the computer will do everything. Both the one in the air as well as the one on the ground. You are going to come home and tell the spouse, you wouldn't believe my day to day, I had to punch the button TWICE <G>.
The good news for us as controllers, the tech companies out there aren't anywhere near a computer solution for doing what we do. They can indeed separate two aircraft one at a time. But then so can a trained talking monkey... You just change altitudes of each of them. But when you throw in a LOT of aircraft, other duities that must be taken care of, and then some weather. That is a different story. The computer just barfs and shuts down, or has the aircraft going all over the sky.
I was on a work group which was working on some gee wiz ATC stuff about a decade ago. We had a Dutch Engineer come in to brief us on what the NLR was doing. Some really neat computer simulations to show us how to separate aircraft. It worked somewhat like TCAS, however it also used headings. It did indeed separate one aircraft from another string of aircraft one aircraft at a time. It had the aircraft turning all over the sky trying to miss five aircraft. When I asked the engineer why the machine just hadn't stopped the aircrafts climb and level him for about three minutes and NO ONE would have had to turn? He stated that this was the most efficient to get the aircraft to altitude so that it would burn less fuel... So they wound up turning almost EVERY aircraft in the problem to miss this one aircraft, who also had to vector around quite a bit.
Computers just can't think in a strange solution yet. The day will eventually be here where the computers have all the power that they need and more importantly, the artificial intelegence that will allow it to be taught all that a good controller knows and how to use it in moving aircraft, safely and expeditiously...
regards
Scott