Expanding on-line tools posing new questions?

 Recentely I discovered Zotero - Firefox extension tool. This (academic) tool is able to do plenty of stuff, that normally takes a lot of time (bookmarking, downloading, creating folders, searching again through the folders...). This brought in front of me the question of trends in academic work.

With Zotero you can order materials in way you want, you can do fulltext research inside materials, you can write notes, tags,  and so on. You can write your article in Zotero's open office text editor and even add citations automatically!

I remembered a book by Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age, where author points out the differences in writing before and after the emergence of digital media. Before digital media, each author had to carry whole concept of writing in his head and put it on the paper continuously. Now, each writer puts segments of his future work into text editor, reworks them, puts them together and separates as much as he wants. New tools go even further.

The main question emerging in confrontation of tools like Zotero is: What changes in academic work will this trend bring?
I guess there are two main directions in which we can discuss this question:

• pessimistic: tools will do all academic writing instead of humans - researcher just puts the criteria into the columns and robot will go trough the sources and do all the work, ending with perfect academic paper
• optimistic: while tools will do all the research needed, finds and organize all necessary information, researcher can spend his time and intellectual capacity on going much deeper to the subject - in the past, maybe the half, or three quarters of academic work was spent on information collecting, now this will be the task for robot taking few minutes.

Of course, both are quite extreme. As usually, reality lies somewhere in between. What do you think?