Dulled Consciousness

This has been sitting in draft state since March, and I don't know when I will get back to it, so I am publishing it. Maybe I will follow up later.

I have been thinking about this for a while, mostly on my drive into work in the mornings, but, how many of those vehicles that have been recalled/had problems recently had manual transmissions? I haven't found the answer to that out yet, but my guess is that its somewhere below the number 1%. The reason for that is driving a manual transmission requires conscious thought. In addition, driving a manual transmission requires simultaneous action from multiple limbs. I feel very confident that if my vehicle had unintentionally suddenly accelerated it would only be a matter of seconds before I had my vehicle under control. I am actually not sure if I would even have a thought process involved, I think it would be more muscle memory that instantly pushes my left foot forward to hit the clutch, and simultaneously pulls my right hand with the shifter into the neutral position. In the split second that this would take, I have already safely counteracted the entire problem. I have not solved it, however, I have taken myself out of the dangerous situation. Next, I can make the judgement decision of whether I will apply the brakes, attempt to downshift or both. Thats the next point about a manual transmission, it allows me multiple options on what to do in any given situation.
My point of bringing this up is that there is a huge clammoring for a quick fix, and whats being offered up is a software fix. I know a little bit about code, and understanding the complexity of a modern automobile, I find it very difficult to believe that even with a workforce of hundreds of programmers, its in any way safe to release a quickly coded patch to a brake and acceleration system. Think about the system before people start clammoring for the software patch. What is it? Its hundreds of processors running millions, if not hundreds of millions, of lines of code. Its a set of software that has been built and tested over the course of years, and has been ammended and grown such that it has probably spawned its own entities into other vehicles. And now, the solution is to rush through and patch some code in a matter of weeks?
That just doesn't sound well thought out to me.
And to be perfectly honest, I don't think it solves the root of the problem. Now, I will admit, I am no Luddite. I love technology. I love to tinker with it, and I love to let it make my life easier. Though to be fair, I usually pick the harder parts of technology, so that something is always broken, and I by consequence always have something to tinker with. However, I have grown to believe that we as a society have come to rely on technology too heavily. We have begun to allow our technology to take over so much of our lives that we are dulling our own consciousness. When I was a kid, I knew every bodies phone number off the top of my head. My parent's number, all of my friend's parent's numbers, the pizza place, everywhere. I was reading people's tweets the other day, and someone had retweeted a conversation with a person being loaded into an ambulance. The conversation was about calling the girl's boyfriend to let him know that she was ok, but going to the hospital. Her response was that she didn't know it. It had been saved on the phone that was smashed in the accident, and she had no idea what it was.