Comment by mrighele
2 days ago
"In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting.
The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm—a development which is later dubbed "Graphitics"." [1]
I’m all for the sci-fi extremes that we might lose valuable skills to cognitive delegation, but the idea that we as a society will forget how to count is… extremely stupid.
To be fair, the average person already doesn't know how to do simple arithmetic.