Humans are exceptional tool-makers. Our skillls, however, evolved from being necessity-driven to novelty-seeking. Capitalism has flooded us with a marketplace of hard to resist gadgets, toys and contraptions.
The main problem with this plethora of ready-to-use tools and conveniences that saturate contemporary times is twofold: exacerbating the problem of our ever-shortening attention spans (again: we’re attracted to novelty) and 2) we shift the onus of understanding the basics of these tools (and therefore fail to utilize them to their fullest potential) from our supreme tool – the mind – to the tools themselves (search engines, asking Ai tools like Chat GPT, etc).
A truism, of our times is that every solution breeds new problems. We keep layering solutions upon problems upon solutions upon problems in a never-ending cycle of change and “upgrade” for the sake of upgrade. This is not only driven by the novelty-seeking drive of contemporary human psychology, but by planned obsolescence being a core feature of contemporary capitalism.
The introduction of technology into a system – any system – for its own sake is usually fad driven and rarely stands the tests of time and human fallibility.
A great litmus test for using a new technology is – does it improve both solution and understanding of the original problem that I had?
If a tool solves a problem but does not facilitate a better understanding of it, then we are dependent on this particular tool. When/if it is removed from my system – so is my solution. This makes for fragile systems. If you go camping depending on a blowtorch to make fire to cook your food, and the blowtorch runs out of fuel and you do not understand how to build a campfire without it, you’re pretty screwed. If you, however, have learned how to use a flint rod and the necessary accoutrements required for starting a fire using a flint strike, then you don’t need to carry a blowtorch and the required fuel. You have a robust system built on a reusable tool and a solid understanding of a critical survival skill.
We all benefit greatly from technologies in our lives. But even more powerful than tools, is a framework that drives forward our understanding and makes us more robust human beings regardless of the technology we have access to at any given moment in time.