I'd argue that having to worry about the being in the correct gear actually necessitates greater awareness of the road conditions and situation. In a manual tra

I'd argue that having to worry about the being in the correct gear actually necessitates greater awareness of the road conditions and situation. In a manual transmission vehicle you have to continuously anticipate what's about to happen (so you can select the correct gear), and so you're forced to pay attention to what's going on around you. In general, I hypothesise that the more a system is automated, the less awareness is demanded of the operator and thus the more likely the operator is to get into some kind of trouble, whether this stems from development of a lazy habit, rustiness or just not being able to recover the situation if the automation abruptly fails. In fact, we've seen several plane crashes attributed to pilot error related to increasing automation in aircraft.