Does relying on machines weaken human capacities?

Whether tools that do our work leave us unable to do it ourselves.

Direction Machine-like humans
Span c. 370 BCE–1912
Questions 3
Works 23
Languages Greek, Latin, French, English, German, Gujarati

  1. Q23Does relying on written records weaken the ability to remember?

    6 answers are hidden while the authors build this question’s position key.

  2. Q24Does using calculating devices weaken the ability to calculate without them?

    Yes2

    • 1762Rousseau, Emile

      The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser our senses; instruments like the theodolite let us neglect judging angles and distances ourselves.

    • 1841Emerson, Self-Reliance

      Owning a watch and a nautical almanac, civilized man cannot tell the hour by the sun or name a star; each tool costs a native skill.

    No3

    Calculation need not require skill1

    • 1832Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

      De Prony's tables were computed by workers who knew only addition and subtraction and were more accurate than skilled mathematicians; this shows calculation can be done by machinery.

  3. Q25Does relying on machinery for ordinary necessities reduce people's ability to provide for themselves?

    Yes4

    • 1854Thoreau, Walden

      Says people who once fed and sheltered themselves directly have become dependent on the tools and property they built, so that 'men have become the tools of their tools.'

    • 1872Butler, Erewhon

      The Erewhonian treatise argues men already live 'in a state of bondage to the machines' and would suffer terribly if machines vanished, since they can no longer live without them.

    • 1909Forster, The Machine Stops

      Kuno says the Machine has robbed people of spatial and tactile capacities, weakened relationships, paralyzed bodies and wills, and compelled worship. This is his speech, not the later narrated collapse.

    • 1909Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule

      Argues machinery has impoverished India by destroying hand industry and that Indians should reduce their use of mills and machines and return to hand-spinning and hand-weaving.

    No3

    • 1832Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

      Argues that a machine which halves the time needed to make an article lets a self-supplying household enjoy the same comforts with less labour, and that displaced labour is soon reabsorbed.

    • 1891Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

      Argues that under proper social arrangements machinery will do all necessary and unpleasant work, freeing people to cultivate themselves; at present it competes with men only because of private ownership.

    • 1899Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops

      Argues that the spread of industrial skill and intensive agriculture lets each nation and region produce its own food and manufactures instead of depending on distant specialised centres.

An early pilot tested models against seven arguments on this question. That list of arguments has since been replaced. Pilot results (earlier method) →