It's like with any skill obsoleted by technology: as long as everything works now and the uptime of the social system keeps growing, nobody has to suffer. But i

It's like with any skill obsoleted by technology: as long as everything works now and the uptime of the social system keeps growing, nobody has to suffer. But if, or when, the illusion breaks, there will be many people taking the hit big time. Albeit a bit far-fetched, navigation with only GPS might be one. Somebody suggested the irrelevance of basic arithmetics in these times of calculators and cash registers. Most of us haven't had their life depend on hunting skills for decades, not to mention the art of keeping lambs and turning them into warm clothes. So there are all kinds of things that just might save us in the event of technological or cultural failure if we still knew how to do it. But then there's the thing that we can't know what's going to happen. It might be that I will never need to navigate myself anymore, or calculate change. But I can't know. And on the other hand, holding on to old skills just for the sake of security sounds stupid as well. Exaggerating, we might learn to live like cavemen in order to drop any dependence on current culture and technological advances, and then something else happens that we can't handle, and then us cavemen die. If something happens and humans need to take the hit, there are a few points to consider: * humans are damn imaginative and very much capable of learning when they have to; * on the other hand, some of us would just die because they aren't. I wouldn't say survival of the fittest but survival of the most flexible; * then again, life isn't a right per se -- in the end it's more like a struggle and has always been. If somebody can't run his life without GPS, he might not do well if his living environment changes. Then again, it might be a good time to learn to do that. Nobody has guaranteed us that everything's always going to work out for us unless we actually invest time and effort in learning new things and constantly changing ourselves to match the actuality.