Even the 6,000-year-old art of handwriting‹from cuneiform and hieroglyphics to 19th-century shorthand‹seems a dying skill. While state-of-the-art pens today transmit texts straight into digital systems, voice-recognition technology works at it to permit us to dictate what we have to say right into a machine, an unfeeling substitute for the old-time secretary curved over her steno pad. The dictionary in the electronic memory makes sure that the spelling is correct. Nobody cares about a "fine writing hand" any more. Graphology has gone the way of the petroleum lamp.

The surgeon still needs a firm hand, and must retreat to consulting if it's no longer steady. But mechanical hands, obeying instructions from the console in the operating room, can do more and more of the actual cutting and suturing. The dentist still drills and pulls teeth by hand, but maybe an artificial arm will soon reach into our mouth to take care of incisors and molars, as directed by the practitioner who sees them enlarged on a monitor. Therapeutic and relaxing massages are performed by hand‹but for how long?

In the manufacturing industries, robots are taking over an increasing amount of the work that manual laborers used to do. Japan today is leading in robotization, but the United States and other nations are catching up. The advanced economies have reached a stage where robots build other robots, populating the planet with mechanical toilers (and making flesh-and-blood workers jobless). Agriculture, too, is becoming increasingly mechanized.

Tailors who wanted to see customers two or three times for fittings, and shoe makers who kept plaster models of their clients' feet have become near-extinct. Department stores today offer clothes and footwear in all sizes, often made in sweatshops in faraway countries; necessary adjustments may or may not be made by store employees.

Good mechanics who can fix a car engine or an appliance that refuses to function are becoming rare. Whenever our refrigerator or washing machine breaks down we are coolly advised to buy the new model and throw out the invalid. Cabinetmakers and other artisans have waiting lists, not to mention plumbers.

Famous pianists have their hands highly insured. Virtuoso hands seem to have developed an intelligence and memory of their own, needing no conscious impulses from the brain. Artists in general have deft hands‹sculptors, painters and designers (although much graphic work today is computer-generated). Handiwork of different kinds is done by cooks, gardeners, florists, violin builders, jewelers, watchmakers, nurses, hairdressers, locksmiths and sundry country and small-town people. Yet urban lifestyles and technology are threatening many of these activities.

Evolutionists see the human hand, that amazingly versatile bundle of bones, sinews, muscles, blood vessels and nerves, as the original or ur-tool, thanks to its opposable thumb. It's the indispensable anatomical step toward civilization.

Today we envy any persons who are able to do more things with their hands than we can. All too many city dwellers discover their own klutziness when they try to fasten again a button that came off a jacket or unplug the washbasin.

Hobbyists who build things by hand in the garage deserve praise instead of sarcasm. Schools should offer more handicraft programs, even making them compulsory. Let's teach our kids carpentry or sewing; they'll suffer from carpal syndrome early enough when they have to work at a keyboard all day. They should learn that their fingers can do more than work 3G cell phones.