I do rue, however the loss of capability of the average American who used to posess a wide variety of mechanical skills, who knew how to change spark plugs, lube a chassis, drive a nail, and had a host of basic skills to draw on.
Those same farm skills were good prep for just about any trade--still are.
I do see that slipping away. Life isn't a video game, computers are great tools, but they will not take the treatment that the tools needed to build shelter for them will. And computer skills will not build that shelter either, at least not yet.
When we lose the ability to pass on basic mechanical skills, we are doomed to the dustbin of history.
It is nice to design technology, but the nation that builds it owns it, and we are building less. Don't confuse what we charge for what we build for what we build, either, which is what the article did.
This is the same fuss we had 10,000 years ago when we changed from hunting to farming. Our Creator seems to smile on the successful, and it makes sense that Abel's harvest went over better than Cain's road kill. The lesson then as now is to simply accept reality and we're all better off.
We're not "building less", we're building more now than ever before. We're just not building the same thing the previous generation did. It's those never-learner's that try to build the same thing over and over-- they're the ones that end up in "the dustbin of history."