Question · Seed idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
Which abilities should remain ours?
A question about which skills are worth keeping even when a tool could do them for us.
Open question — no answer required
- Territories
- Meaning
- Kind of question
- Existential · Ethical
About choosing, deliberately, to keep exercising an ability that a tool could take over — and what criteria might justify that choice.
Why it matters
Tools have always taken abilities over, and mostly nobody mourns them. What makes the current case different is speed and scope: the abilities being absorbed are the ones used to evaluate the tool's own output, so the loss removes the check at the same time as the work.
Tensions
- An ability worth keeping is one you would not notice losing until you needed it to catch an error.
- Keeping an ability requires using it, and using it when a tool is faster is a cost somebody has to keep paying deliberately.
Positions taken
has response
- Tools cross a second watershedClaim
It supplies the criterion the question needs: the second watershed.
Questions this opens
questions
- Where will future expertise come from?Question
An ability nobody exercises is not transmitted, whatever anyone decides it is worth.
Connected ideas
questions
is questioned by
- What did the prompt leave out?Question
What a prompt cannot carry is a first approximation of what a person still has to be able to do.
- What should not be automated?Question
The task-level question only has an answer once the ability-level one does.
Paths through this question
appears in
- What the Tool TookPath
Arrive where the argument has to be settled case by case, not in general.
Explore this question in the map
Continue exploring
- ClaimTools cross a second watershedIllich's two thresholds: the point where a tool starts to help, and the point where it takes the ability over.
- ConceptTacit knowledgeKnow-how that a person has but cannot fully put into words or explicit rules.
- QuestionWhat did the prompt leave out?A variant of "what did the representation leave out?", applied specifically to prompts and generated answers.
- QuestionWhat should not be automated?A question about which tasks lose something essential when a person stops doing them directly.