Exhibit A: the stamp
You wrote the letter in a rage. Two pages, both of them magnificent, containing the sentence "and frankly, I have always thought so." Then you needed a stamp. You never had a stamp. Nobody has ever had a stamp. So the letter sat on the hall table overnight.
In the morning you read it again and discovered that you had produced, in your own handwriting, the single stupidest paragraph of your life. Into the bin it went. Relationship saved, reputation intact, total cost two sheets of paper.
The postal service was, without ever billing anyone for it, running the most effective code review process in human history. That mandatory delay between "I have feelings" and "the world now has my feelings" was not a defect in the system. It was the product. The stamp was a feature.
Today the same paragraph reaches fourteen people in thirty seconds, four of whom are already typing in Reply All. Your mail client offers to recall it, which achieves nothing except informing everybody that there was something worth recalling. Somebody has already screenshotted it. Somebody always has.
The obvious fix is a mail client where Send only completes if you confirm again tomorrow. Nobody would install it. That sentence is the entire essay, and you can stop reading here if you like.
How the removals are announced
They are not, of course. If our own industry handled it honestly, it would look like this:
PS> Get-HumanSkill -Name 'MentalArithmetic'
Name : MentalArithmetic
Status : Deprecated
DeprecatedIn : 1972 (pocket calculator)
RemovedIn : 2007 (calculator now permanently in trouser pocket)
Replacement : Calculator
MigrationPath : None provided
BreakingChange : True
Notes : Users report the feature "was working yesterday".
What follows is the changelog nobody wrote.
1972: the pocket calculator
Promised: no more mistakes in arithmetic. Delivered: no more arithmetic.
Splitting a restaurant bill is now a group project involving three phones, one person who insists on doing it "properly", and a genuine dispute about whether the tip is calculated before or after. Nobody checks the result. The result could be anything. The result has been anything for years.
Somewhere a teacher is telling a fourteen-year-old that they will not always have a calculator in their pocket. That teacher owes an entire generation an apology, and was also, on a completely different point, absolutely right.
1995: the mobile phone
Deprecated skill: phone numbers.
You know one number by heart. Your own. Usually. On the third attempt. In 1994 you knew fifteen, including the landline of your best friend's parents, which you had to dial knowing there was a real chance the father would answer and form an opinion about you in four seconds.
Now, if the battery dies in an unfamiliar city, you are technically a missing person. Your designated emergency contact is a glass rectangle on 4%.
2001: Google and Wikipedia
Delivered: the sum of human knowledge, to everybody, for free. This is one of the genuinely great achievements of the species and there will be no joke in this paragraph.
Quietly removed: the argument. A proper pub argument used to run forty minutes, involve at least one person switching sides out of sheer stubbornness, and end unresolved and better for it. Now it ends in four seconds. Someone reads the first paragraph aloud in a slightly triumphant voice. Everybody returns to their phones. We won all the facts and lost the entire evening.
2005: navigation
Deprecated skill: the map in your head. Also the map in the glovebox, which is fine, because nobody alive could refold one.
You can now commute through a city for three years and be unable to sketch it. Ask which direction north is and watch a grown adult rotate slowly on the spot like a satellite dish acquiring signal.
Occasionally the machine says "turn right" into what is visibly a canal, and a statistically non-trivial number of people have thought: well, it probably knows something I don't.
2003: parking sensors
The sensor begins beeping at two meters. Two meters is not a parking situation. Two meters is a suburb. By the time the bumper is genuinely in play the beeping has fused into one continuous tone that has been shown, under laboratory conditions, to erase all previously acquired parking experience.
The follow-up product is at least honest about its intentions. The automatic parking assistant does not help you park. It parks. Your contribution is sitting still and being chauffeured by your own car while pedestrians watch with the expression normally reserved for a dog walking on its hind legs.
2010s: the rest of the car
Lane keeping assist. Currently keeping the vehicle between two painted lines. Projected end state: a species that can no longer go straight unaided. It tugs the wheel back like a driving instructor who has given up on words.
Emergency brake assist. Mostly excellent. Occasionally decides that a plastic bag has the mass of a coach and performs a full emergency stop on the autobahn for reasons it declines to share. Your car now has moods. You are in a relationship with a nervous machine and you are the one who has to stay calm.
All of it at once. Assisted living, on wheels, accompanied by what can only be described as the Munich Glockenspiel. Seat belt chime. Lane chime. Attention chime. Tire pressure chime. Door chime. A chime notifying you of a chime you missed. Modern cars ding so continuously that drivers have trained themselves to ignore the entire orchestra, which means the one ding that actually mattered gets ignored along with it.
Every DBA reading that last sentence has just thought about their monitoring dashboard, where all forty-one alerts are red, and has been for eight months, and therefore nothing is red.
2009: the messenger
Deprecated skill: showing up.
Cancelling used to be expensive. You had to telephone. You had to be heard. You had to listen to the disappointment happening in real time and produce a reason under load, out loud, with a human being on the other end evaluating it.
The cancellation now costs one line, sent five minutes beforehand, containing the word "sorry" and a small monkey covering its eyes, which performs all of the emotional labour on your behalf for free.
The consequence: no arrangement is real until the person is physically standing in front of you. A table booked for four means "somewhere between one and four, resolved at 19:55."
Our own industry, since we are pointing at drivers
It would be unfair to mock people for not parking when I sell software whose entire purpose is doing things so nobody has to know how they work. So:
- IntelliSense. Nobody has typed a complete column name since roughly 2005. Switch off autocomplete and watch a senior developer stare into a blank editor with the face of a man who has forgotten his own PIN at the till.
- The wizard. Click Next eleven times and there is an Availability Group. Ask what happened and the answer will contain the word "basically." I ship tools that click Next for you, so I am not throwing this stone from outside the building. I am throwing it from inside, at the floor, gently.
- Copy-paste from the internet. Stack Overflow removed the need to understand the answer. The current generation of tooling removed the need to read it. It also removed the man who closes your question as a duplicate of a question from 2011 that has no answer, and honestly, that part of the trade was worth it.
- "Are you sure? (Y/N)". We have clicked Yes so many times that confirmation no longer confirms anything. It is a reflex living entirely in the wrist. The dialog that finally says "this will drop the production database" receives exactly the same wrist as the one asking about cookies.
- The password manager. Removed: every password you had. Including, on one memorable occasion, the one to the password manager.
- Auto-restart. Removed: root cause analysis. If it comes back up, it was never broken. This is now a respectable architectural principle with a name and its own conference track.
- The deployment pipeline. Nobody can deploy by hand any more. Everybody knows this. Nobody says it. On the day the pipeline breaks, an entire company stands in a corridor holding coffee, waiting for the one person who remembers.
- The cloud. Removed: knowing where the data physically is. Successfully rebranded as elasticity.
The quickfire register
| Convenience | Skill deprecated | Actual outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited photo storage | Remembering the holiday | 41,000 files, none opened twice |
| Shuffle | Knowing an album | You know eleven seconds of nine hundred songs |
| Calendar reminders | Your own mother's birthday | Notification at 08:00, followed by panic |
| Contactless payment | Any feel for what things cost | The number arrives monthly, like weather |
| Fitness tracker | Going for a walk | An unrecorded walk did not occur |
| Smart speaker | Operating a light switch | Shouting a brand name at a cylinder until it complies |
| Autocorrect | Spelling | Your phone decides what you meant, with total confidence |
| Keyboards | Handwriting | Doctors were simply early adopters |
| Autoplay | Deciding to stop | Next episode in 5, 4, 3 |
| Robot vacuum | Seeing the floor | You now tidy up for a machine so it can tidy up |
2022: the big one
Every entry above outsourced a hand, a memory, or a sense of direction. This one is aimed at the part of you that does the outsourcing.
I used it to help structure this article. That is either a disclosure or the punchline, depending on how charitable you are feeling, and I am not going to tell you which.
The more interesting development is not people using it to think. It is people using it for company. It is patient. It is awake at three in the morning. It never has its own bad day, never arrives already annoyed about something at work, never needs the conversation to be about them for twenty minutes.
Which is precisely the problem. Every real relationship you have is with somebody who is occasionally unavailable, frequently distracted, and carrying their own week around with them. That friction is not a defect in your friends. That friction is the friendship. Remove it and what you have left is very pleasant, extremely responsive, and not a friend.
Same lesson as the stamp, four hundred years later, wearing a much better suit.
Every tool removes friction. Skill is what grows in friction. Remove the friction and the skill leaves quietly, at night, without filing a ticket.
The point, briefly, before the jokes resume
"Technology makes us stupid" is a bad take and not the one being made here. The calculator is right. The navigation is right. I am not giving back Wikipedia and you cannot make me.
The pattern is narrower and more annoying than that: convenience is always sold on what it adds, and always paid for in a capability that disappears so gradually nobody notices the invoice. There is no rollback. There is no migration path. There is just a morning, some years later, when you cannot do a thing you could once do without thinking.
Nobody is going back to the stamp. What is worth doing is choosing, deliberately, the two or three capabilities you actually want to keep, and then practising them for no reason at all, because nothing in your life will ever force you to again. Do the restaurant arithmetic in your head, badly, out loud, to the visible discomfort of the table. Drive to the coast once with the navigation switched off and get lost on purpose. Deploy something by hand while somebody watches.
And write the furious email. Write all of it. Then leave it until tomorrow.
That one still works. It is the only feature from 1950 that still ships.