TACHO;
what is your standard response when people you socialise with come out with such tripe? I mean, we have all had these question
I ask them how safe their car (and they) would be if they "pushed the speed control button" in the driveway and left the car on it's own to drive downtown to work.
If speaking to a professional, say a lawyer, I suggest they send their own version of "autoflight", their legal secretarial staff (who after all, really do all the work, don't they?), in to do the actual criminal trial. After all, it should be easy when all the work is done for them, right?
If speaking with a doctor or a dentist, I bring up the notion of CAM - Computer Assisted Manufacturing, and suggest that if such machines can mill exquisitely detailed machine parts and weld cars together surely with sufficient sophistication (automation), these marvelous machines can open the patient up, follow the program that some desk-doctor has previously entered, R&R and then close?
And surely, with the same brilliant automatic technologies, any machine can drill and fill or in today's "preventative" mode, clean teeth according to standard programming of such tasks? Easy..., morceau d'gateau.
These are rough comparisons with some minor faults but are sufficient to make the point. If they border on cheekiness, so be it. The initial suggestion that our profession is "easy" is about as cheeky as you can get without the suggestion being an outright disrespectul one and appearing stupid.