The downside of automotive technology

[Yonadav]

Quite a bit of straw there. I like machines. But machines do enable the abandonment of basic life skills to a degree that is not easily measurable, so we don't really know what the potential cost might be in the long wrong.  It makes sense to be thinking about these things, rather than making vapid strawman statements in opposition.

Well, that's the whole point of machines, innit?  To make 'basic life skills' needless.  I feel pretty comfortable not having the skills to find the clay to build the kiln to fire the pots to store the meat from the antelope I ran down and killed with a fire-hardened stick.  These were all once basic life skills.

Boru

Look at what I said about us losing basic life skills to a degree that is not easily measurable.  We don't entirely understand what skills we are losing. Also, I think that you are conflating 'life skills' with 'way of life'. What are we losing when a freshly graduated high school honor roll student can't convert .85 into a fraction? Sure, she can do math with a calculator. But she doesn't understand rudimentary things about how numbers relate to each other. That makes her a monkey with a calculator. In what other ways are we being reduced to monkeys? We don't really know. And perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps we hit a peak in the general population's literacy, mathematical, and scientific literacy, and the norm is for most humans to not understand these things. Most of us were illiterate until pretty recently in social evolution, and perhaps most of us are going to be basically illiterate again.