It was the fourth day of a project in California, and I had driven between the hotel and the location at least six times, three times there and three times back. Not very far, it was a journey of maybe 15 minutes, barely 8 miles. There wasn't much to the directions: you turned right out of the parking lot, merged onto the main drag, and less than a quarter of an hour later turned left onto the access road of the facility where we were working.
Still, force of habit had me plug my phone into the rental car so the map of the route popped up on the screen. It wasn't really needed, though one day I was rerouted to a side road because of "traffic." Turned out a light along the way had a slight glitch, leading to about 6 cars waiting patiently. Hailing from the New York City area, calling that traffic was laughable.
On this morning, however, I plugged in as usual but couldn't connect. As I said, I was on the road, away from my usual instinctive routes, even if by now I knew this particular set of headings and didn't really need the guidance. No matter: I tried unplugging and replugging. No dice. The third time didn't prove to be a charm either. I'm embarrassed to say I sat there, contemplating if I should try and make the short journey without any digital assistance. One more attempt and it connected. Whew!
I've been driving for many years and was a boy scout long before that. I prided myself on my collection of gas station maps and my ability to get from one place to the next. But ever since mapping programs came out 20 or so years ago, that part of my brain has decided to take a holiday. Without the need to use it, and indeed learning that it was actually better to rely on the programs and let them route me around real traffic problems, it's a skill that has withered like a muscle after an accident.
It's no different from other "talents" which I took for granted that have dissipated as technology has proven more adept than my head (a low bar, but still). I can no longer remember most phone numbers without extreme concentration. My ability to do division or multiplication in my head beyond the simplest sets of numbers has vanished. My penmanship was always atrocious, but it's gotten even more illegible as I have no need to write anything on paper as opposed to peck it out. That's not to say I am incapable of doing any of these things. Should my phone and the internet go up in smoke tomorrow I could still get from here to there, still recall a few phone numbers, still total a restaurant bill and figure the tip, still scrawl a note. I just wouldn't be able to read it.
It's been like this throughout history. Most of us are pretty bad these days at hunting or growing our own food, at constructing shelter, at making our own clothes. Mind you, these were not specialized talents, but rather everyday competencies people needed in order to survive. Over time certain folks proved better at one or another, and so leveraged those abilities to build businesses and provide that service. Farmers and builders and tailors sprung up, and it became beneficial for both sides, one to make money as the supplier, the other to get better quality than they could do themselves as the consumer.
The difference is that those skills weren't lost but farmed out to others; we as humans didn't forget them but rather shifted them. Were you interested in any of those talents you could relearn them by apprenticing to the masters of those domains. This time feels different. By ceding brain power to technology, we are giving those skills up to black boxes that remain opaque. As long as they do our bidding, no worries. But if not...
In the movie "WALL-E" humanity has progressed to where robots and machines take over virtually every task. The remaining population is obese and spends their days floating around aboard spaceships in comfy chairs. We're not there yet (we can't float and don't have that kind of spaceship) but perhaps we should start to relearn how to remember a phone number. And more.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford uses his phone for too much. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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