I'd say it's the opposite, just like everyone has a car but barely anyone could do the most basic maintenance on it. This is arguably getting worse in every sector because of increasing complexity. (trade off for increasing convenience, as usual)
Familiarity is not knowledge.
I'd even say that technology sets us back because know we're all thinking we're much smarter than we are, I can google any issue I have and find an answer with minor brain usage. I don't need to know how basic orientation skills because I have google maps, etc ...
It's a nice tool for sure, but the only "second nature" we're getting is the "second nature" of googling anything that take us more than 5 seconds of brain time.
I lived without a phone for a few weeks (unwillingly) and I was surprised about how little of my daily life I could still do without frictions.
The only lingua franca I see coming is emojis and memes, not programming languages. That's a nice example of tech worker echo chamber / over optimism / bubble though.
Valid counterpoint. However, we could still be witnessing metaphorical "acne" resulting from instant communication. With no more time-delays or costs associated with communication, the threshold for what makes something worth communicating drops.
What I'm speaking of is not 20 years from now, but 500. When we've moved past the banal, when people have assimilated instant communication but have also learned the preciousness of time and the negative long term effects of information overload. In a way, a bit like how we quickly moved past custom ringtones, but on a much grander scale. Programming is relatively novel nowawadays. It won't be in 500 years, it will just be like a hammer.
Only the future will tell. Maybe it's me being pessimistic but so far tech (for the masses) is mostly used for:
- making money through ads.
- enabling people to live their shallow ego trips on fb / ig / whatever is used these days. (influencers, &c.)
- drown people in endless entertainment to make their work/sleep cycle tolerable.
None of this is helping society is a whole, but, sure we have nice electric cars 90% of the population can't afford and we'll soon send rocket to Mars.
Do we need $2.6k foldable phone ? pizza delivery drones ? same day delivery ? slaves delivering food through apps like deliveroo ? Is that the best we can do with tech today ?
Or is it just enabling our mindless consume / produce cycle with no end goal ? For every meaningful tech advance we have 10 startups raising millions to press a fruit bag [0] or be a rental agency [1].
It's like a sad and lame black mirror episode.
Maybe even longer. It took thousands of years from the invention of writing to everybody being able to read and write. Being a scribe was a viable career path for a long, long time. And even now, most people know how to read and write but do it rather badly. Just a few are actually good at producing and/or understanding text. I reckon the same thing is the future path for computer programming.
Familiarity is not knowledge.
I'd even say that technology sets us back because know we're all thinking we're much smarter than we are, I can google any issue I have and find an answer with minor brain usage. I don't need to know how basic orientation skills because I have google maps, etc ...
It's a nice tool for sure, but the only "second nature" we're getting is the "second nature" of googling anything that take us more than 5 seconds of brain time.
I lived without a phone for a few weeks (unwillingly) and I was surprised about how little of my daily life I could still do without frictions.
The only lingua franca I see coming is emojis and memes, not programming languages. That's a nice example of tech worker echo chamber / over optimism / bubble though.