Freed: Technology is making us useless

Montreal Gazette

2 days ago

I was driving home one recent night on a winding set of streets and expressways near LaSalle when my GPS went black.
I suddenly realized I'd been blindly following Google Maps with no clue where I was. Now I was cruising down a street called Shevchenko Blvd. in the middle of who knew where.
I spent the next few minutes driving aimlessly about, searching for familiar street names, hopelessly lost in my own city.
Then, fortunately, my GPS clicked back on and took command.
Like many people, I'm losing whatever sense of direction I once had. But it's only one of many human skills that are atrophying, as technology does more and more for us and we do less and less.
We have apps to remember our appointments, split our restaurant bills and remind us which TV series we're watching and what episode.
We have others that locate where we parked our car or forgot our keys, and more that will ghostwrite our wedding and condolence notes.
As machines take over more human tasks, we humans are becoming useless. For instance:
Directions
The GPS is a mixed blessing for the directionally disabled like me.
When travelling, I no longer stop regularly to ask directions from pedestrians who answer: 'Go three streets past the Blockbuster store that closed, then left at the condos where the church once was, then right at the big tree that was destroyed by lightning last year.
'But if I were you, I wouldn't start from here.'
Instead, we get turn-by-turn GPS commands that treat us like four-year-olds. 'Turn right in 300 metres … 30 metres … five metres.
'You have arrived at your driveway! Turn right, stop car and climb seven stairs.'
Even my most directionally savvy friends worry they're gradually losing their inner compasses by not using them. Meanwhile, I miss the random strangers I often chatted to when asking directions.
But there's no point stopping anyone today. They'll just shrug their shoulders, then pull out their phone, type in your destination and politely hand it to you.
Math
It was always my thing, calculating everything from restaurant tips to taxes just for fun.
When friends bought calculators, I refused, but then one day my phone just came with one.
It soon became hard not to double-check my math with the phone, which was faster and better, until gradually it took over my job and my skills faded.
Recently, I tried to calculate the cost of a magazine subscription for one month versus a year, by dividing the annual rate by 12.
But I barely remembered how to do mental long division, using my old high school rules:
Calculate how many times the denominator goes into the numerator — or was it vice versa?
Multiply the numerator by the quotient (whatever that is), then carry the one (from where?)
Take an Advil because my head hurts.
Let the calculator do it.
Calculating tips is another vanishing skill as we simply push the 15, 20 or 'exorbitant tip' buttons.
Recently, Quebec ordered restaurants to deduct taxes when calculating tip percentages.
So a bistro I was at with friends last week has stopped offering tip 'options' until they update their credit card machines. Instead, we had to calculate our own tips on a $277.64 bill split five ways, and our entire table of college graduates was paralyzed.
Not surprisingly, everyone soon reached for their phones.
Writing
It's still something I love, but for phone emails, my big thumbs often make big mistakes.
Recently I've started dictating my messages because my phone makes way fewer typos than I do.
The downside is when my wife suddenly speaks to me, her 100 words get inserted into my half-dictated message, so I'm always hissing 'Shhhh — I'm dictating!'
The upside? The dictation spellcheck almost always gets it write.
Repairing things
It's another lost skill because today's electronic parts are simply replaced, not repaired.
Decades ago, you could bang on your car's starter solenoid, or tinker with the carburetor.
Now there's a complex fuel injection system that even your garage mechanic just replaces, because no one understands its electronics.
What other skills will disappear as technology takes over?
Will people get lost in their own homes when their home GPS system goes offline and doesn't announce 'Turn left in hallway in seven feet, then turn right to living room'?
Will remembering faces become another lost skill because our phones do it for us, flashing the names of everyone we meet?
Perhaps a future teenager's remark will be: 'Hey, you actually recognized that person yourself, like just with your brain. WOW!'
Then again, think of all the wondrous new superskills everyone's developing instead, like knowing how to Zoom with your mom in N.D.G., or ask AI important questions like: 'How can I make a vegan banana bread?'
Or being able to shout 'Hey Siri, where's my phone?' and have it answer: 'I'm here, Josh! I'm here!'