[zzz95]

I understand what you are saying and I agree with it too. What you are worried about, is what happens in the short term. But, in the long term, as the technology matures, this is what should be happening. It will become an easy to use black-box which works for almost 99.99% of the cases and gracefully handles the remaining cases. You will no longer need PhDs to use the black-box, only to develop them. For e.g., look at numerical analyses toolboxes, like automatic integrator. Even if you do not understand the underlying system of differential equations, the libraries just work or throw a nice legible error. They encapsulate a ton of ugliness inside, but that is all right as long as the solutions are predictable.

[has2k1]

Really interesting view point. When the convenience of use improves along with the performance of the methods, then we worry less about not understanding how the methods work.

In the broad sense, isn't this an example of how we trust?