Hi Chris;
I believe all A330 mikes (4 - two forward seats, two observer seats) are hot by design which I expect would include cabin interphone communications, (handset on the rear of the pedestal). It's reasonable to assume that the cockpit mike picked up pilot-FA communications in the cockpit.
From an earlier post, above, "There were already signs of this impending problem 20 years ago, and it is not restricted to FBW Airbuses.", yes indeed there were. In fact AW&ST ran a series of articles on automation in August of 1989 and in late January and early February of 1995. The problem was seen and being understood from the earliest days.
A discussion of why the problem not only continued to grow in breadth but also in depth, (ie., it got worse) is beyond the present thread's context and "charter" so to speak and each of us will have our own theories that I'll just touch on.
The trend itself was, and remains clear, however. I agree with come posters here who say that more manual flight training may not be the answer, although psycho-motor skills do need constant reinforcement to build muscle memory that can be quickly relied upon when rational thought and analysis can take more time.
To me it is separation of the cockpit from flying the machine that is the model for the separation of the vastly different human psychological-physical acts of button-pushing (which is "on-the-surface" cognitive activity, from arms-legs control movement, which (I would offer) is more on the autonomic side of human muscular activity. One no longer straps the airplane on so to speak, one sits "in" it and manages it and is placed psychologically "outside" of the machine.
We're not digital creatures and although we quickly adapt, there is what I used to call a "digital veil" between pilots and the machine that wasn't there in, say, the DC8 (or, I would hazard a guess, the VC10). I don't think the human factors which have evolved out of the past 20 years, of which this accident is but one example, have been examined nearly deeply enough - perhaps that is for all those safety conferences held around the world but I would like to have seen more from the BEA in this regard.
That said, I think automation is a far safer way to fly transports and given the numbers, crews have adapted to automation, "mode Normal", admirably.
But I can attest having experienced it, when it fails and the airplane (A330) is in the process of degrading itself to its next level of control as it adjusts to a system failure, it can be momentarily, very busy. One just has to let it do its thing and settle down.
As with the loss of airspeed information, generally one does not have to act swiftly, automatically but slowly carry out the Abnormal SOPs as has been amply described in these threads.
Anyway, enough drift.