200 YEARS OF RUM, SODOMY AND POINTLESS TASKS:

The smartphone in your hand enables you to record a video, edit it and send it around the world. With your phone, you can navigate in cities, buy a car, track your vital signs and accomplish thousands of other tasks. And so?

Each of those activities used to demand learning specific skills and acquiring the necessary resources to do them. Making a film? First, get a movie camera and the supporting technologies (film, lights, editing equipment). Second, learn how to use them and hire a crew. Third, shoot the movie. Fourth, develop and edit the film. Fifth, make copies and distribute them.

Now all of those tasks are solved by technology. We need no longer learn the intricate details when the smartphone programmers have taken care of so much. But film-makers are now freer to focus on their craft, and it is easier than ever to become a film-maker. Historically, technology has made us individually dumber and individually smarter - and collectively smarter. Technology has made us able to do more while understanding less about what we are doing, and has increased our dependence on others.

These are not recent trends, but part of the history of technology since the first humans began to farm. In recent decades, three major changes have accelerated the process, starting with the increasing pace of humans specializing in particular skills. In addition, we outsource more skills to technological tools, like a movie-making app on a smartphone, that relieve us of the challenge of learning large amounts of technical knowledge. And many more people have access to technology than in the past, allowing them to use these tools much more readily. [...]

A major downside of increased dependence on technologies is the increased consequences if those technologies break or disappear. Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge offers a delightful (and frightening) exploration of how survivors of a humanity-devastating apocalypse could salvage and maintain 21st-century technologies.

Just one example of many is that the US Naval Academy just resumed training officers to navigate by sextants. Historically the only way to determine a ship's location at sea, this technique is being taught again both as a backup in case cyber-attackers interfere with GPS signals and to give navigators a better feel of what their computers are doing.

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