Irony

   The Irish Times Education Section recently advised readers how to help children learn to spell, and used this opening sentence: "Surely with spell checkers we don't need to learn to spell?"
   In the same paper on the same day, the Business Section had a story about buying real estate and ran a subheadline referring to "property inventors."

   This is another example of the limited value of spell check programs. In this case, the word inventors is spelled correctly, but just happens to be the wrong word.
   Until and unless inventors can teach computers semantics -- meaning and context -- spell check programs will remain just a tool -- useful, but only as good as the user.

Patterns and typographical errors  

 Any keyboard operator with long experience will admit that the fingers develop minds of their own, in the sense that some keystroke patterns are so common that the fingers run ahead of the brain.
   Indeed, programmers are making use of the common pattern phenomenon and telling computers to anticipate what the user wants.
   Again, this may be another useful tool for those who are not sure of what they want to say or how to say it, but for allegedly professional communicators, this is not a tool but an interference.

   Moral: Excessive reliance on computers can be dangerous to independent thought. Beyond that, you are relying not only on the machine, but more important on the groupthink of the designer/programmer.
   In short, do you want to say what you want to say, or what the groupthink machine wants you to say?