This article is written from personal experience, perspective, and reasoning. I am not claiming any of this a worldly fact, but rather using it as a way to make you think and question the world around you in hopes of making it better.
There seems to be a general decline in the quality in which people reason, perform tasks, relate to one another, sympathy, empathy, and various other aspects in human intellect and behavior. On the flip side, there is so much more automation in our world in areas such as finance (ex. Rocket Money), social media interactions (ex. scheduling posts/updates), driving (ex. driver assist systems), writing (ex. ChatGPT), art (there are so many image generators out right now), problem solving (again, many apps that solve math and other problems for you), the list goes on.
Kids have been using Amazon’s Alexa to help with their homework for years now, which doesn’t help them make the proper relations in their mind on how to develop a proper solution to an issue they have. Something that still impresses me are the apps that you can point your phone’s camera at a complex algebra problem (whether it’s a word problem or numbers/symbols), scan it, and the app gives you a step-by-step solution on how to get the correct answer. Examples of such apps on the Google Play Store are Gauthmath, Photomath, and Mathway. To their credit, since most of these types of apps will show you how to solve particular problems, you can argue that they are a teaching tool as well. However, I believe that their effectiveness and what the app is actually used for as well as what is absorbed is ultimately decided by the end user.
Why work on something yourself when someone/something else can do it for you?
This may make me sound like a culprit, but I am a fan of automating many things in our lives. The reason I believe myself to be a bit different is because I like to develop the automation myself. This means that I understand or learn about the ins and outs of what I’m trying to automate, rather than have no understanding at all. An example that I like to use is a crypto trading program that I wrote myself. It trades the way I want it to by making decisions the way I wrote them based on my own self-education and experience with such markets.
So what’s the difference?
Let’s say that I gave/sold the program to you. You don’t know how it works or what conditions cause it to perform certain actions, you just know that it makes your account balance go up. Essentially, the knowledge stops at you. You don’t to know how it works because the program is taking care of that for you. The only person in this chain that has that knowledge is the creator of the program, me.
Remember practice makes perfect? Ever hear of perishable skills?
Let’s focus on driving for a moment. Nowadays cars have so many sensors and automated systems to help keep you in your lane, help you back into a parking space, let you know when to stop, let you know when another vehicle is in your blind spot, etc.
I have personally seen so many people rely on that orange/yellow light attached to their side-view mirror rather than check over their shoulder to see if there is a vehicle in their blind spot. The problem with this is that the sensor can fail by either not detecting the vehicle in time (or at all) and someone is getting side-swiped. By the way, there is a delay on many of those sensors depending on the manufacturer. They’re typically not instant, or at least I do not know of a vehicle that is. Maybe a Tesla, because those things have ridiculously fast and accurate computational systems.
You didn’t give an example of perishable skills being affected!”
You’re right, so let’s go back to math for a bit.
Let’s use an easy algebra problem, (feel free to substitute something more complex to have the point of this be more impactful). You’ve probably already figured out the answer: . Let’s say that you’re younger and haven’t learned this process yet (or, again, that the problem is something far more complex than the example given) and instead you use a nifty, little app on your phone to solve the equation. You find out that the answer is , but you don’t understand that you need to get by itself. Furthermore, you don’t realize that in order to do so, you need to divide both sides by . Although the example is simple, and maybe a bit silly, it is the principle that I am trying to show you.
Apply this principle to finances and you can see that someone who doesn’t understand how to manage their money and is wholly reliant on an automated system to calculate their bills and what’s safe to spend would very likely be considered irresponsible with their money without that system to do all the “thinking” for them.
One automated financial function that I am guilty of not checking on every month is automated payments for various bills. It is a very convenient way to ensure that I never miss a payment, but I have allowed that to be a way to be less involved in exactly how much money is being drafted for particular expenses. Now, I would agree with you if you bring up the point that as long as my income is greater than my expenses that I will be fine. You’d be right about that. However, there have been times where the automatic payment does not get pulled and the banking institution tries to hit me with a late fee or it causes some other financial issue. It is a rare occurrence, but I’ve had it happen at USAA and Capital One in the past. It is proof to me that these systems can and do fail and I should be vigilant and prepared to ensure that payments are drafted on time.
Where are you going with all this?”
As a society we have gone from knowing the answers to something or how it works to “Rocket Money handles that for me” or “Just Google it.” I’m sure you’ve heard the joke of going to “Youtube University” to find out how to do something. The answer or process is always found somewhere or done by someone/something else. don’t to know how to do anything, because the answer will be given to you or the entire task will be done for you.
Consider this ratio: a development team of 10 people create an automated product that is used by 1,000,000+ people. Those 1,000,000+ people don’t have a clue how the product works or why, they just know that it makes their lives easier by giving them the answer to their problems. This is why I believe the ratio of people who actually have worldly knowledge compared to the people just benefiting from that knowledge is becoming a wider gap.
I would like to acknowledge that there are many more factors and variables to this discussion and that I certainly didn’t touch on them. I also realize that this article is perhaps more of a discussion on topics such as:
General human behavior
Evolution of society
Whether or not we are in the stages of becoming more of a collective “hive mind”
If this is a reflection of how people value themselves, each other, or life in general
A list of countless other topics
Because of this, I invite you to be a part of this discussion. Let’s all discuss this with a sense of respect and a drive for the truth (if there is one). If you would like to contribute to this pursuit, please comment below. I welcome the viewpoint of another as it is the best way to learn anything: by combing viewpoints to assemble the whole picture.
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