Skills Technology Convinced Us We No Longer Need

Credit: Unsplash/Shahabudin Ibragimov

Over the past few decades, technology has made some of the biggest and fastest advancements. We as human beings — at least in this part of the world — have slowly started outsourcing a lot of things to technology. 

In 2026, AI is on the rise, so much so that it is causing a memory shortage/crisis. And with AI being the fastest-spreading technology in human history, we are starting to go from outsourcing some things, to becoming more dependent on external digital tools. This got me thinking - how would we as humans survive if all of the modern technology we currently depend on were to suddenly become inaccessible? 

There's a difference between using a tool and not being able to function without one. For most of human history, technology gave us a little boost that extended what we could do. What is starting to become different is now we have started replacing what people could do, and often without really even noticing it. 

The skills below aren’t about nostalgia. These are baseline human skills, not nice-to-haves. They’re capabilities we once had that slowly went away each time a more convenient option showed up (often in the form of an app on a smartphone). Some of us lost these capabilities gradually. Some of us never even built them in the first place. Either way, these are the kind of things that, somewhere along the way, quietly stopped being common knowledge. 

Writing

Taking pen to paper isn’t as necessary as it once used to be, and why would it? You don’t need to leave a note on the counter explaining where you went, nor do you have to write snail mail letters and stick them in a mailbox. Why? Because you are reachable on your smart phone all the time! 

When we do “write,” often on our phones or computers, we are guided by autocorrect, and more recently generative AI. Even then, often emails can be sent/read like a text message, including emojis and colloquialisms (I am totally guilty of this). But how many people can structure, draft, correct and finalize a communication properly, without any assistance from technology? 

As AI use becomes more prominent, writing well is becoming more and more of an important skill for us to keep. That is because writing is really just communication in its most fundamental form. How information moves, where it lands, how it gets understood. That matters way beyond being able to draft a professionally-sounding email. If we keep outsourcing the construction of our own words and thoughts to AI, at some point the question will become, can we still actually communicate without it? 

Balancing a cheque book 

Writing is a fundamental part of communication, as well as an essential skill for other things, like record keeping. One formerly common form of record keeping was balancing a cheque book. 

This can be one of those “heard about it but never actually understood what it meant” kinda things for some of us. For those of us who have never had to balance a cheque book since we can now easily access our account balances in real time - here is a quick explanation. 

Before technology did it for us, people tracked every transaction written, by hand, in a small logbook that came with their cheques (your cheque book!). So every deposit, purchase, fee, etc. was tracked in this book. Added, subtracted, day in and day out. When the statement would arrive by mail at the end of the month, it would be time to review. Line by line, you’d have to compare your handwritten notes in your cheque book to your bank statement. If everything matched, you were good. If it didn’t, you would have to find the discrepancy. Hence the term, balancing your cheque book.

This wasn’t just for accuracy - it was for awareness too. When you kept a balanced cheque book, you knew exactly where your money was going because you had physically written down every single transaction. Nothing got through unnoticed, There was no subscription you forgot about, no fee you didn’t catch. 

Today, our banks record all this stuff for us automatically, and we login through an app to check it (or maybe sometimes we don’t…). While convenient, this made us lose one important thing: the value of actually knowing where all of your money is going. The practice of balancing a cheque book was never really about the cheques. It was about staying conscious of your money in real-time and on purpose, not just glancing at a number and hoping it makes sense. 

The modern equivalent isn’t a little book and a pen, it’s reviewing your transactions regularly. We should know what is coming in and out, and catch anything that doesn’t look right before it becomes a problem, perhaps by creating a basic personal budget. Different tools, same discipline, and same end goal: being in control of one’s finances. 

This is another great example of where technology quietly made our lives more convenient, and we might have missed the caveat that allowing for convenience in personal finance can lead to certain levels of ignorance and in more serious cases, loss of control.

Reading a map

One very interesting piece of technology that has quietly pushed its way to the forefront of our lives is GPS. Gone are the days where your mom would write down directions she heard on the phone, then miss an important landmark and get lost and have to find someone to give you directions. We don’t keep paper maps in glove boxes anymore (who remembers those?!). 

Nope, today we have a GPS in our pocket. All that is needed is an address, and we are on our way without even a second thought. Super convenient yes, but what effect does that convenience have on our cognitive abilities? 

Sadly, research shows that it can cause a decline in a significant area, and that is spatial awareness. A study published in Scientific Reports (Nature) found that more GPS used caused more decline in spatial memory. What does that mean exactly? It means GPS is a great example of where we have gone from outsourcing a task to becoming more dependent on it. It means, the more you use and rely on GPS to get you where you are going, the more you lose your spatial memory. 

Navigation is one of the most fundamental human skills there is. How good is your spatial memory? Quite literally, knowing your place in the world (without the blue GPS dot, that is). If you have ever been somewhere unknown without a cell signal or an almost-dead battery and felt a low-grade panic, you already know the answer. 

Basic cooking from ingredients 

A skill where the stakes are literally physical - preparing, storing, managing, and cooking food are all important for survival. Nowadays, we have such easy access to tools that will take the hard part of cooking away from us. From recipe databases to meal kits, if you need to know how to cook something, technology is there to guide you. 

Much like the other things we talked about here, this is an aspect where technology was supposed to make our lives more convenient. And it does, but again, at what cost? 

When I think about Shepherd’s Pie, a common meal in these parts which I have been making for decades. I remember making this meal countless times for my family from memory. When I think about the recent times I have made it, I have had to open my recipe app to remember the ingredients and their amounts. How does that make sense? A recipe committed to my memory for years, and that I make regularly, but as the years go by I rely less on my memory, because the recipe app is there to save the day. 

This begs the question, have I been refining this skill as I thought I was? Or have I been going along with the motions while quietly outsourcing this cognitive task to technology? 

If you have ingredients, cooking tools, and a heat source, but have no idea what to do with all of it, the food doesn't really help you. 

Basic First Aid 

Knowing what to do in a medical emergency is an amazing skill to have. Quick and smart decisions can literally be the difference between life and death. 

This skill is not about replacing a doctor or a medical professional. It’s about the time before one is available. The gap is real, and unfortunately it is getting longer in Canada. 

There exist so many ways to be aware of prominent medical emergencies and what to do in those situations - from CPR training to the acronym B.E. F.A.S.T. to recognize the signs of a stroke. These exist because knowing this information and knowing how to apply it to real-life situations is critical to human survival. 

This is one where we should absolutely outsource less to technology. This one cannot wait for the internet to load. Someone collapsing in front of you for no apparent reason is not a crazy what-if scenario. This happens in work offices, in schools, at the grocery store and on airplanes. Yes you can call 911 and they will help you as much as they can until help arrives. They might tell you to do CPR - but do you actually know how? 

So the question isn’t really whether or not you will need this skill, it’s whether you’ll know what to do when you do. 

Information Literacy

Speaking of knowing what to do, what are the best ways to find something out when you don't know? Back in the days before we had Google in our pockets, how exactly did people figure things out? 

Knowing how to access and verify the reliability of information is becoming harder to do with such instant access to different kinds of information online. Sure, having a Google search answer for every question sounds like a convenient advantage at first. But having access to information and knowing what to do with it are two very different things. Having infinite information doesn’t mean we are better informed - it actually makes it harder for us to separate the truth from the noise. 

Think of all the things we rely on a Google search to find - whether that be something as trivial as finding out if fluoride toothpaste is still safe to use or as important as trying to figure out what your legal rights are in a sticky situation. If you need that information quickly (and accurately), do you know it? Do you know where to find it? If not, what could happen? 

Information literacy is the ability to find what we need, evaluate whether it's actually true, and apply it to a real situation as needed — not just Google something and accept one of the results that supports our agenda. In a world where anyone can publish anything, that skill is what separates people who can navigate information from people who get led around by it.

Dependency vs. Capability

Outsourcing tasks to technology is fine, until it becomes the only way you can possibly function. These skills are the difference between someone who uses tools to live their life more efficiently, and someone who cannot operate without them. 

It is the difference between being capable and being dependent, and this isn’t just about extreme scenarios. It shows up in everyday life: 

• Understanding our finances without guessing

• Finding our way without relying on a screen

• Feeding ourselves without being told how

• Knowing what to do when someone needs help

• Getting information we can actually trust

• Communicating clearly on our own

These skills aren’t outdated, they are foundational. Technology should support them, not replace them. 

The more we rely on something external to think for us, the less we trust ourselves to figure things out.