this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
4 points (83.3% liked)
Technology
87450 readers
4078 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And I could manually relocate all the contents of a palette, too. Just not anywhere near as quickly and easily as I can with a forklift. The analogy is still apt.
Ok. Look at it the other way. The person who can lift the heavy thing may not be able to continue to lift the heavy thing if they use the forklift all the time and don't ever train their muscles. Which is what the article is pointing out. Doing the task by hand re-enforces knowledge and skill. Over-reliance on a tool is a well known phenomenon.
And yet the person with the forklift is moving more stuff than the guy who did it by hand could manage. The "over" in "over-reliance" is a subjective value judgment and I just don't agree.
I'm not seeing the problem here. Technology is developed specifically for this purpose, to remove unnecessary burden from humans and enhance their capabilities. There's nothing noble about laboring unnecessarily hard to accomplish goals in a suboptimal manner. I could write programs in assembly language but instead I use high-level languages and compilers. Does that result in over-reliance on compilers?
John Henry died in the process of "beating" the steam hammer and then got replaced anyway. Nowadays it'd be considered foolish to do that work by hand.