In Shelley Power's "The Value of Human on a Humanless Web", she talks about the mom scenerio in the Scientific American article:

"Mom needs therapy? Oh no! Well, we'll work together and make sure she's taken care of!" In this picture, I search for available plans in the area and then call the hospitals and I talk to the people to see if I can trust them to take care of mother; neither I nor [my sister] is so busy as to begrudge the time taken. "

While I agree with most of her article, this part rang false for me. Yes, there's a danger of dehumanizing our interactions if we let the machines make our decisions for us, but there's another more profound way to view the mom scenerio:

Let's say your mom was just diagnosed with colon cancer and was given only weeks to live. Let's say you were understandable blown away by this news, but somehow had to hold it together because life-and-death decisions were being made, and you didn't know who to trust. Let's say you didn't know her doctors, didn't know oncology, didn't know alternatives, didn't know which of the conflicting opinions to believe. Let's say the rest of your family was freaking out, and the doctors didn't agree, and you had to find all available alternatives by yourself, surfing the web, talking to people you knew, talking to strangers, with the loudest ticking clock of your life slowing marking off the last moment's of your mom.

This was last December and January for me. Eight weeks from the word tumor to her funeral, and every day was uncertain, especially for the doctors. To my credit, I was able to investigate the alternatives, learn which doctors to trust, and overturn all the stones so we wouldn't later feel we could have done more.

But I was lucky: I know the administrator of a very large northern hospital, who gave me valuable advice. I'm good at asking relevant questions, even when my brain is spinning. I learn quickly, and can keep a lot of detail in my brain. I speak English. Were none of these the case, I would have had a much harder time.

Even so, in that time, it would have geniunely helped to be able to type "colon cancer" in Google and get back something more than a US News & World Report survey of hospitals (which took me a long time to find as it was). If there was a semantic "web of trust" that connected information more intelligently, it would have made my life much easier, even if it was just the simplest sifting. If I could have learned that "Mayo Clinic" and "Sloan Kettering" meant "real-deal" and that information "trusted" by their doctors was more valuable than a layperson overview from About.com, I could have saved a lot of time and stress in a situation where I was basically groping in the dark.

Yeah, letting the machines do my busywork can lead to lazyiness, and this can be a concern. But in this case, where I really needed good information quickly, the technology would have been humanizing: I could have spent more time with my mom.