The Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology (And How to Reclaim Them)

Do moments where you run up against your dependence on modern technology get you wondering about the ways some of your personal capabilities seem to be atrophying?

Graham Lee has spent years thinking about this idea. While he's a digital skills educator who appreciates the way technology can enhance our abilities, he worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are.

Lee is the author of Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology, and today on the show, we talk about some of those dozen endangered skills, including navigation, reading, writing, craftsmanship, and solitude. Lee offers case studies on how these skills enhance our humanness, why their loss matters, and how we can reclaim these capabilities and a greater sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy.

Resources Related to the PodcastWe, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific by David LewisAoM series on learning how to navigate with a map and compassAoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us HumanAoM Podcast #793: The New Science of Metabolism and Weight LossAoM article on the benefits of solitude Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition by Peter NabokovWatchmaker Geoge DanielsCastaway Alexander SelkirkNotebookLMConnect With Graham LeeGraham on LinkedIn