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Back in the 1970s, automotive technology was a lot less sophisticated than it is today and this meant that anyone with half a brain, a socket-set and a service manual could do just about everything needed to fix minor or major faults.

Indeed, anyone who had an old British car like a Morris Minor knows full well just how simple these machines were. Look back further and things got even simpler and easier to fix.

Of course it's just as well they were so simple because back in those days it was quite an achievement to get a car to 100,000 miles (160,000 Km) and most would have required major engine work long before then.

These days most modern car engines never need the head lifted or any major service work done, yet most will happily run to well beyond 200,000 miles (320,000Km) without any problems.

Advances in metallurgy and computer aided design has meant that modern cars are hugely more reliable and efficient - but they're also vastly more complex.

Modern cars are infact, so complex that few owners would even venture to change the oil.

The simple mechanics of yester-year have been replaced with complex electronic engine management systems, multi-point fuel injection, turbochargers, intercoolers, anti-lock breaking, all-wheel drive, catalytic converters, etc, etc.

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In short -- most modern cars have become "black boxed" and I'd wager that few modern drivers would have a clue what to do if they broke down on the side of the road somewhere.

All this sophistication is, of course, great news for the environment and consumers wallets -- but what's it doing for our kids?

When I was 18, at least half of my friends knew how to, and had done, a valve-job or put new rings in their cars. Many of them had also "hotted up" their vehicles by adding lumpy cams, twin-carbs, free-flow exhaust systems, etc.

We're not talking about simply taking it into the garage and saying "put in a new camshaft", we're talking about getting down and dirty -- stripping the engine and rebuilding it yourself.

By doing all this work ourselves, we could build some pretty powerful cars even though we were on an apprentice's wage.

But what do kids do today?

Well it seems like the boy racers spend a huge fist-full of money on cool neon lights, mag wheels and bolt-on performance products -- but do they get down and dirty?

Does the average teenage male know how the engine in his car works, or even how to change the oil?

Is the march of technology producing generations of kids that now have little or no desire to investigate the inner workings of mechanical things and actually fix them when they break?

Instead of learning valuable new skills by diving under the bonnet, I wonder if today's young males are happier playing with a PlayStation.

Even the good old microcomputer has become "black boxed" to a far greater degree than it used to be.

Go back 20 years and you'll find that a goodly number of computer users were cutting bits of code for themselves. Indeed, buying a computer was often the first step in becoming an amateur programmer.

Admittedly this was partly because there were far fewer off-the-shelf applications so sometimes it was just necessary -- but the fact was also that writing programs was effectively the ultimate computer game to many PC users.

Today I'd wager that not only has the percentage of PC owners who write code fallen dramatically (which is to be expected since PCs are now being used by a much broader spectrum of people) but that the absolute number of amateur programmers has fallen too.

Back 20 years ago, every computer came with a copy of Microsoft Basic -- these days you might get MS Office or MS Works -- but it seems that most kids just want to play games or do their homework. Except for a very small hard-core of good old fashioned hackers, the urge to peek under the bonnet and fiddle with code has gone. Is that because

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What will be the ultimate outcome of all this increasing complexity in just about every form of technology we use? Will we lose our natural curiosity and simply become a bunch of consumers with little or no knowledge of how the things we use actually work?

Is the increasing complexity of our technology effectively dumbing down the population?

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