As Technology Grows, Knowledge Slows

Technology growth seems to be on this exponential curve that lost its ability to slow down. Thats great news! Right? Well... yes and also no. Obviously, technology has a million perks and all the upside in the world because it solves problems. We don't like to have problems as humans. As we scramble to create a solution for every little inconvenience in our lives, we need to be careful that we don't lose our fundamental and tribal knowledge of how everything intrinsically works. There are too many examples to point out but an obvious one would be that I didn't even have to type up this blog post if I didn't want to. I could have just given ChatGPT a prompt and pressed enter. Boom a blog post written in 30 seconds. Now for someone who values quantity over quality that may be a good idea, but in the long run we can't compromise quality for convenience. If we start doing that then cars might start breaking down, planes might start falling, and no one will know how to fix anything.

As the Baby Boomers and Generation X folks start to retire, we are entering a weird point in time where many of the biggest technological advancements made will no longer have the people who created them around working on them. People who were around for the creation of the first personal Mac computer are on their way out the door and it is up to the next generations to become the subject matter experts. I don't think there is an issue with the younger generations not wanting to become experts, it's just they are being given easier ways of achieving the same things without exerting as much effort or time into their craft. That to me can be dangerous. When you think about the Baby Boomers and Generation X, they had no internet or "quick and easy" way of doing things. Yeah, that may have made things a lot harder for them, but they were all the better for it. They had to understand things by thoroughly studying and learning how they work; they couldn't just post a code snippet into ChatGPT and ask what's wrong with it (I'm guilty of doing this more than I should). They had to spend the time to understand fundamentally why or why not something works. Hard work feels like it is becoming something of the past because everyone wants to take the quick and easy way to success, and newer technology enables that. Now I'm not blaming anyone, no one has done anything wrong. All I am proposing is that we don't lose sight of where we came from and remember that there is no easy way of becoming an expert at something. It takes time and effort.

There's no easy solution for the possible overuse of technology because it undeniably makes everything more efficient. The only real solution is to try and find ways to keep discipline when solving problems. Instead of going to google or ChatGPT every time you are stuck on a problem, try and resist the urge and use critical thinking by yourself to solve the issue. Critical thinking is a skill that can teach you to solve any problem in the world whether its technology related or anything else. The mind is more powerful than you probably give it credit for and just by writing down the problem statement with a pen and paper you might get the stimulation you needed to think of a solution. This is one solution to a topic that has many solutions. At the end of the day, it comes down to hard work. Your moral compass will probably be able to tell more than anything else. If you have put in the work, then you will feel a sense of accomplishment for achieving something because you did it yourself. If you used shortcuts then it probably won't feel quite as good, and you won't be better off in the long run.