>I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop

is there a lot of evidence for this? You can broadly put technology into two camps. Technologically that, as it becomes more powerful, demands more attention and skill from the user and just the opposite. A bow is more powerful than a stick but also more demanding to use. A car is more powerful than your feet but your population ends up obese. Almost every single piece of software, with the exception of maybe debuggers, who an astonishingly amount of seasoned developers do not utilize (I suspect for that reason), is a car and not a bow.

There's a study on English college students roughly ten years ago who were tasked to read the first few paragraphs of Dicken's Bleak House. They were even allowed to use a dictionary and the internet. A majority could not interpret the text. That's where we were at before LLMs. My rural working-class grandfather at an underfunded Catholic school had to translate Ovid from Latin into German in 8th grade. It wasn't even a personal attack, we're just this fried now.

▲

newswasboring 12 hours ago | parent [-]

You are equating governance failures with technological ones. At one hand you are asking me to prove how technology like writing or cars are useful but on the other hand you are bemoaning people's declining reading abilities. What even is your point?

	▲	Barrin92 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		that's not what I said at all. I pointed out that there are technologies that facilitate human development, and there are technologies that stunt and replace it, say a car. What I was asking was is: If it's true as you say that we have replaced our atrophied skills with other ones, what are some of those, or technologies that facilitate them? Be that governmental, social or otherwise. Because we have a decline in reading, a decline in physical ability, a decline in sociality, to the topic of the thread a decline in the quality of software and engineers, but very little to show for it in my book.