[eternityforest]

It makes life easier at the expense of some indescribable sense of "quality" or connotations of "wealth", the feeling that the product makes a statement about the skill of the maker and the user, that there's real skill involved not just a technological cheat code in real life.

Which seems to be very culture specific, it's important to some but not others.

I don't have much doubt that people get lost less with phones now. It's reliable and available on demand at any moment. Basic utilitarian trips might even use less gas because if dynamic traffic data.

The main thing we lost is the sense that things are real and solid, rather than unearned power ups in a global scale video game, but by technical engineering measures, it seems like almost every single product outside of the arts has improved, year after year.

Old analog stuff is cool, but if I only had room in my bag for one, I'm probably going to take the latest new version, every time.

[brightlancer]

Rather than a subjective cultural "quality", I think there's an issue where folks are dependent upon technology and that handicaps their ability to learn or perform advanced skills.

In the US, younger students are performing worse in mathematics than previous cohorts; calculators aren't a singular cause but their ubiquity does encourage a mentality both from children and adults that basic arithmetic and even algebra or geometry aren't important, which then becomes worse performance by older students who lack the fundamentals.

I'd be interested to see a study on how often folks are "lost" and how that was defined: if someone's phone lost power or crashed mid-journey, then the person would qualify as lost because they don't know where they are or how to get out of where they are, but even with the phone _telling_ them where to go, do they really know where they are or how to get out of where they are? Or are they just a simple child being given and following directions from a parent, without any concept of what those directions mean?

[eternityforest]

It's the same problem math has always had for my whole life. The fundamentals are important to reach the high level stuff but no longer directly useful, and people aren't always sure whether they want to go into a field that needs it, until they are past the age where people used to learn the basics.

Algebra is not useful to an average person directly, and the path to actually getting a job that needs math is long enough that nobody in school is going to think through their future like that, we don't really have a culture of kids thinking a decade ahead. I sure didn't.

Plus, the main thing educators seem to talk about is this mysterious "New way of thinking" you get from math. But nobody just trusts their teachers on that, since it's not something that can be explained easily.

It probably doesn't help that they still like to pretend you're going to actually directly do long division IRL. Even if there's a reason to learn it, I don't see why we need to tell people they'll actually use it directly, when it seems pretty clear most people don't.

But that seems like a matter for educators to solve rather than tech or tech culture.

Is there a different optimal curriculum that takes into account the existence of calculators and the fact we learn math for different reasons now? Or is the best way to teach it unchanged?

Philosophically I suppose phone-dependent people are perpetually lost, but I think a practical definition would be "Unable to navigate to their destination with available equipment".

Someone who's phone dies isn't really experiencing what most know as lost unless they have no power bank or car charger, only then are they going to really be experiencing some panic.