A very broad observation can be made about much of current society —
Good anti-theft device for cars? Standard transmission: few people in the criminal class (which skews young) know how to drive standard.
A lot of people don’t know anything more than Google.
People can’t read maps. Why bother? I have GPS.
Skills have degraded all over the place. When it comes to flying a plane, the cost is deadly. In other areas, the cost may not be deadly, but is still high. We’ve dumbed ourselves down.
“We’ve dumbed ourselves down.”
We’ll be easy picking for the machines! :)
I've always liked Sc-Fi because it is so often prophetic.
Years ago I read a story which was later turned into a Night Gallery episode (The Little Black Bag). In the future, people are so dumbed down that the intelligence is built into the tools. There's a glitch in time and a surgeon's bag is sent back and found by a loser and his buddy. They discover the secret and go into the cosmetic surgery business (the scalpels cause no pain and automatically do what needs to be done).
The two losers get into a fight over the profits and one guy is killed by one of the the scalpels. A red light goes on in the future and all the surgeon's tools in the are reset to dumb - just like any other of todays tools.
The survivor is hauled before a large audience to prove he does painless surgery, and he displays the scalpel's safety be drawing it across his throat. As the people file out, the express wonder why someone would commit suicide in front of all those people.
I thought it a good, if far-fetched story and went out to a McDonald's. The kid at the register was punching pictures of hamburgers and fries - no numbers at all. Suddenly, the story was not that far-fetched at all.
It's gotten worse, as pointed out by others here.