The other day was a burn day, so I decided to torch the stack of dry weeds and tree limbs brought down by a storm that I had piled up in my backyard. Luckily, my twenty-something granddaughter was there to help.
“I want to light the fire,” she demanded.
“Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“Grandpa, I came prepared,” she said as she pulled a large butane lighter out of her purse and gave it a test light.
The thing put out a flame more like a welding torch than a lighter.
“Do you have any paper,” she asked.
I gave her a handful of paper which she wadded up and shoved into the pile near the largest of the limbs. She then set her torch to it. The paper burned up in a flash, but the limbs were only scorched. She applied the torch directly to the limbs and one started burning but when she pulled the torch away, the flame soon went out leaving the limb smoking.
“Got any more paper, Grandpa?”
I laughed and fingered a tiny piece of paper in my pocket I had reserved in case she failed. My grandpa taught my dad how to start a fire. Dad taught me. I taught my daughters. Now, it was clear that the teaching had not gone any further and might have been lost somewhere between the invention of butane torches and the internet. My mind went off on a tangent while she used up the rest of the fuel in the butane lighter without getting the fire started.
“Here,” I said, “watch how I do it.”
I took the small piece of paper, wadded it up, and placed it just under one of the smaller limbs. Next, I gathered a small pile of very dry twigs which I used to make a teepee over the paper with a few larger twigs over the top of them. I then took out a matchbook and with one match lit the fire. As the twigs caught the flame, I put progressively larger sticks on top. It wasn’t long before the pile was ablaze.
This is just a simple illustration of how generational survival knowledge is being lost. It’s not only knowledge, but also the ability to do what were once considered normal everyday things. For instance, I predict that in the not-too-distant future we will have lost the use of our legs. When I was a kid, we walked a lot and when we didn’t walk, we pedaled tricycles and bicycles. Now kids pester their parents for a ride to go somewhere and when they do use their own vehicles, they don’t have to pedal because they are battery powered. We don’t walk to the store a couple of blocks away. We drive.
On the brain side, how many phone numbers does your kid remember? How many do you remember? How often do you and your kids use a search engine to find an answer to a question as opposed to the times you use a book to get information? Can your kid do simple math without a calculator? How many hours a day do you or your kid spend relating to a real person who is present with you versus the time spent relating to whatever is on the screen? How’s your memory? Remember, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Sure, you’ve got great hand-eye co-ordination from all those video games, so why do you need an electric toothbrush to clean your teeth? Yes, you can find any information you want on the internet, but what happens if the power goes out or the internet goes down or your computer crashes? Can you figure out how to get information from books?
Great. We have AI, Artificial Intelligence, now. It will fix any glitches, outages, or other problems. We don’t even need to think. AI does that for us. Will we lose our ability to think for ourselves as well? By the looks of what is happening in our society, the answer is yes, it is already gone.
What we don’t perceive in our highly convenient world, is what we are losing. The brain and the body are connected and influence each other. In this modern world we have dishwashers, cars, electric bicycles, electric toothbrushes, and cell phones. Soon we’ll have robots do our work, leaving us to sit around turning into fat, amorphous blobs entertained 24/7 by images produced by some device and projected into our brains. If we don’t like the images, we’ll just telepathically change the channel.
“AI, come take care of me! I need a drink with an umbrella in it and could you clean me up downstairs?”
“What do you mean AI says I’ve reached my limit?”