And how many people are forgetting already how to do things for themselves? I have seen science writers speculate how on Earth something as technologically successful as Man could possibly go extinct (with heavy overtones of fart-sniffing, of course). Well, that's easy. Take away their tech support, and the entire species collapses. How do you take away their tech support? I think we're seeing how. Degredation of mental abilities due to lack of selection pressures, crossed with degrading quality of product, a slowdown of REAL technological progress, and, well, I think what is about to happen is just looking at a lemming population crash from the inside where we know what the species in question is thinking.

Here's a story of "precursors" for you - a species rises up from the ashes of an extinct one that was great at technology, but killed off by its own hubris.