It was thrilling for me, the first time I sewed a button onto a shirt.
I was sitting in a conference room, waiting for a meeting to start, and one of the buttons on my favorite polo—a shirt I’d owned for probably a decade—had popped off earlier that day. I stopped by a grocery store on the way to the meeting and picked up a little one-dollar sewing kit, and I opened up YouTube on my phone, watched a two-minute instructional video about how to sew a button onto a shirt, and that was that.
It took me a little longer than two minutes to get it right, but it wasn’t long before my shirt was whole again. And I felt fantastic: a job well done. A mediocre job, no doubt, as button-sewing goes. But I hadn’t just repaired something I treasured, I had also learned a new skill. In situ. In minutes. At a very low cost.
“Living in the future is amazing,” I thought. “We no longer need to fear the historical scourge of button-less shirts.”
I’ve always loved the idea of becoming a cyborg; of melding with technology in useful ways. Maybe getting a metal arm that grants super-strength, or maybe some kind of augmented reality eyeball that allows me to see an additional layer of data in my environment.
Even more compelling, though, is the concept of having access to information on demand via some kind of internal hard drive or internet access point. Technology augmenting my memory, giving me the ability to download languages and “recall” them as if I had learned them in the traditional way. Having an always-on awareness of location via my internal GPS unit, which could be checked using the same internal operating system I used to “know” how to ask for directions in Farsi. Or having the ability to pull up situational knowledge as I need it: how to change a flat tire, how to cook a soufflé, how to calm oneself before an important meeting, and so on.
The joke in the tech world is that we were promised flying cars and jet packs, and all we got was an always-on network that allows us to connect with the majority of people on the planet, instantaneously and with video, and access to all the world’s knowledge, whenever we want it and for free.
We have supercomputers in our pockets that grant us access to this network, and although it’s not the same thing as having instant-recall of information we’d forgotten, in many respects it’s quite close.
I couldn’t, with a thought, “recall” how to sew that button on my shirt and just know how to do it. But I could pull out my phone and in just a few minutes try my hand at a skill I’d never even thought to attempt before. The same is true of languages and the translation software I have installed on my device, and of other skills like cooking and changing a tire and just about anything else I might want to learn.
We are cyborgs, in a sense. But more like deconstructed cyborgs.
The computers are in our pockets, on our desks, in our cars, baked into our appliances instead of in our heads. We wear our technology on our wrists and in our shoes, atop our eyeballs, correcting for imperfect vision, and in our chests, correcting for heart problems.
It’s all damn impressive, and when you step back and take a look at the immensity of it all, of just how much we’ve blended ourselves with our technology, it’s easy to see embedding computers in our brains, doing more processing underneath our skin, as a mere iteration of what’s already happening today rather than as some crazy, line-crossing revolution.
The cyborgs have already arrived: we are them, and anything we do to bring our tech closer to us is more of a user interface adjustment than anything else. It reduces latency.
All that said, there is an aspect of this trend that’s worth watching. It’s something that I’m reminded of regularly, because I enjoy the benefits of having all of this knowledge at my fingertips, but I also enjoy deep, slow, progressive learning.
Over the past few months I’ve had three different friends tell me about the hiring policy to which they adhere at their companies. And in all three cases, when they look for new people to add to their team, they look for people who know how to find answers, not people who believe they already know all the answers.
Said another way: memorization and regurgitation might be encouraged in some spaces, including, quite often, within the world of academia. But that skill is less valuable in the real world when you’re looking for people who are flexible and capable of adjusting to new realities.
Far better to have a job candidate answer an interview question with “I don’t know, but I can find out in a minute or two,” than to have them fumble through a half-answer or to confidently give an incorrect one. That sort of response indicated the answerer had adopted a veneer of competency without actually being competent, and these friends of mine wanted to hire humble knowledge-seekers, not reflexive face-savers.
At the same time, though, knowing you can learn something isn’t enough. It’s fine and good recognizing that you, at this moment, have the capacity to learn, within minutes, how to sew a button on a shirt. But that’s not the same thing as knowing how to sew a button on a shirt. It’s also not the same as having the experience of having sewed a button on a shirt.
This capacity to know, then, should be tempered with acquired, kinetic knowledge. And one must take the time, be it two-minutes or two-years, to actually do the thing, embed that knowledge within muscle memory and experiential knowledge, before it becomes practical information.
Owning a book about baking bread isn’t the same as knowing how to bake bread. Having been accepted to a university isn’t the same as having a university education. And having this technology at our fingertips isn’t the same as knowing all the things there are to know.
But it can sometimes feel as if these are the same things. It’s easy to become complacent—to not feel the need to invest the time and energy in experiential learning. Because we know, in a pinch, we can Google the answer; we can watch a quick YouTube video and pick up the fundamentals.
This is the double-edged sword of this type of technology: it both empowers us and weakens us. It gives us more capabilities than we would have had without it, but it also incentivizes us to spend less time becoming capable, less time going through the tedium of understanding.
The balance that must be struck, then, is between information access skills—using this technology to get the information you need, when you need it, and to use it quickly when prudent—and the ability to take that information and convert it into deeper understanding.
This can be tricky because it draws upon two very different traits.
The first is a sort of quick, confident efficiency, and the second is a patient, humble resiliency.
The former is about filtering through noise to find the signal, and using one’s best judgement to establish fact from a multitude of competing perspectives and resources. It’s about using the proper interfaces and resource pools, and utilizing those interfaces, diving into those pools to retrieve the best possible information for your needs.
The latter is about utilizing that information to come up with methods, routines, habits, and disciplines that will help you move beyond a superficial understanding of whatever it is you’re glimpsing. To not just have the recipe for baking bread, but to understand why the yeast behaves as it does, how this bread compares with other breads, why ingredient ratios are important, and how the bread is best utilized with other ingredients to make a meal.
It’s not as sexy—in a science fiction sense—the idea of having access to all this information, but still having to learn, to train, to go through the educational motions to become competent with a new skill set. Simple “recalling” this knowledge via some technological means feels more like the future we were promised, I think.
Maybe someday we’ll figure out how to transfer not just raw information, but also muscle memory, experiential memory, and things of that nature. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
But for now, those of us who wish to use these tools to their utmost, while also staving off intellectual and capability atrophy, are best served by approaching the field of learning dualistically.
Not as tech-fearing Luddites, and not as Google-worshipping technophiles, but as disciplined and tech-savvy learners-of-things who are equally capable of finding what we need to know, deploying our newfound knowledge, and maybe even innovating our own iterative or revolutionary knowledge and sharing it with the world; resulting in a new generation of videos and other informative content for our fellow cyborgs to discover when their buttons need sewing.
This essay was originally published on my Patreon page, where patrons get access to additional essays each month. A huge thanks to the wonderful patrons who sponsored this piece.