Our skills become rusty and eventually disappear when they go unused. As a result, humans are becoming less capable as we rely increasingly on technology. This is the thesis of a new book, The Glass Cage, by US technology writer Nicholas Carr, whose previous work has included the popular essay “Is Google Making us Stupid?”. He argues that our jobs and lives are being impoverished by our dependence on computers and automation.

Carr cites examples of just how dangerous the result can be. On the last day of May 2009, an Air France flight plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 passengers on board. The reason, it was found later by investigators, was the autopilot had disengaged. The pilots, faced with having to fly the plane manually, suffered a “total loss of cognitive control”.

But our dependence does more than just lead to dangerous consequences, says Carr. It also leaves us bored and unsatisfied, both in and out of the workplace. Mastering and using skills is one of life’s greatest pleasures, yet it is the very thing that automation works against by distancing us from being actively involved in the world. Not only do we become prone to “stupid” driving mistakes as we blindly follow our satellite navigation systems but we rarely exercise our mental mapping skills and lose the pleasure of wayfaring in the process.

So much of the cognitive and manual work pilots now undertake has become automated that they can be considered to sit not in glass cockpits but glass cages, Carr argues. As doctors increasingly follow automated diagnostic templates and architects use computer programs to generate their building plans, their jobs become duller. “At some point you turn people into computer operators – and that’s not a very interesting job,” Carr says. We now cede even moral choices to our technology, he says. The Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, for example, will unthinkingly hoover up a spider that we may have saved.

Not everyone buys Carr’s gloomy argument. People have always lamented the loss of skills due to technology: think about the calculator displacing the slide rule, says Andrew McAfee, a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management. But on balance, he says, the world is better off because of automation. There is the occasional high-profile crash – but greater automation, not less, is the answer to avoiding that.

Carr counters that we must start resisting the urge to increase automation unquestioningly. Reserving some tasks for humans will mean less efficiency, he acknowledges, but it will be worth it in the long run.

In the meantime, he sees flickers of hope. In 2013, US regulators notified airlines that they should get pilots to spend more time flying manually rather on autopilot so they remained able to take over in emergencies. And last year, looking to boost craftsmanship in its cars and innovation in its production lines, Toyota began replacing some of the robots in its Japanese factory with human workers. Could it be time for a “made by humans” movement?