AUGUST 30 — Back in 2001, I had to go to KLIA every weekend and I always used the same taxi driver.

When I recall his skills (as he used to pick me up before picking up my other colleagues), my mind is quietly blown: He was able to drive to any house on any street within a 10-mile radius of SS2 — this would be considered a superpower nowadays.

Alas, today, we have Waze. Such a useful ubiquitous tool on the road which, unfortunately, has removed directional memories from every Malaysian.

God forbid the app shuts down when we’re about to go to some wedding party at some restaurant we’ve never been to before located “somewhere between TRX and the American embassy” (!).

On (rare) occasions, my taxi driver had to (very briefly) consult a (physical) map but, seriously, how many modern urbanites know how to read a map other than Google Maps nowadays?

Today we are inundated with tools that don’t just save time, but quietly teach people they no longer need any underlying skill.

TLDR: We increasingly can’t live without products which make us “dumber”.

Take Google Translate which has done more harm than any other tool in cancelling language classes.

Because why bother taking time to learn Vietnamese and Spanish words and grammar when you can speak your own language into the phone and have your speech auto-translated when you’re visiting Hanoi or Madrid?

Likewise, A.I.-fitted phone cameras which have destroyed the craft of photography from the average user; the “auto-adjust” function removes any motivation for us to ask how many changes in saturation, vibrance, contrast, etc can really help our photos.

Don’t even get me started on university students who can no longer write proper essays since DeepSeek and Gemini can do the job for them within minutes.

Or even TED talks and TikTok videos which reduce complicated topics (which have sharpened scholars for decades) to 15 and, uh, 2 minutes respectively.

Imagine someone who’s studied psychology for more than a decade being “lectured” by some dude who saw an Insta reel on ADHD; anyone who’s ever cut their teeth studying a subject can immediately identify the pseudo-knowledge coming a mile away.

The issue here isn’t just about technology making life more convenient or easier. It’s about people using tools in a way which makes them believe they no longer have to spend serious time and effort learning certain things.

Or, worse, this is the story of modern contraptions making people believe they’re much smarter than they are.

Netflix rows, YouTube autoplay, TikTok’s For You page don’t merely just suggest; they potentially replace taste formation.

You stop hunting, stop sitting with a difficult album or a slow film, stop building the “private canon” that used to be how people became interesting.

I remember first listening to musicians like Def Leppard and Debussy and asking myself why I enjoyed the music. I doubt I always got a “right” or wise answer but at least in the past I never liked a song simply because it’s been played two billion times on Spotify.

Needless to say, when we spend time listening — really listening — to albums like Hysteria or classics like Claire de Lune, something inside us changes and grows, a process essentially short-circuited with infinite Spotify “smart shuffles”.

Malaysians should also be more concerned about institutions which award post-graduate and doctoral qualifications to students who can barely speak the language in which their dissertations are written.

Or about MBA courses which are meant to elevate business thinking and effectiveness of would-be directors and managers but end up creating a class of folks who are experts at yapping non-stop and Tai-Chi-ing problems away.

And need I mention some educational organisations whose staff go around claiming that people from certain ethnicities can fly?

In all the above educational examples the outcomes are students who believe they have come out “smarter” but, you know, could be quite the opposite.

Finally, with all due respect to Christopher Nolan, there’s a case that The Odyssey, whilst smashing box-office records (becoming the highest grossing R-rated movie ever), nevertheless dumbed down a literary classic.

Instead of Homer’s “the man of many turns” (liar, flatterer, inventor of the Trojan Horse, sex slave to a sorceress, etc... basically a figure you simultaneously admire and distrust) audiences around the world were cheering for a guilt-racked veteran who’s nothing more than a Greek version of a remorseful action hero.

The real product today isn’t convenience. It’s the feeling that we already know the way — even when we couldn’t find the restaurant, the word (or ourselves?) without the app.

And even when we leave the cinema sure we’ve met Odysseus when all we’ve really met is a stripped-down Hollywood version of, uh, Nobody (see note 1).

Note 1: That’s how he identified himself when the Cyclops asked him his name. Check out the original story to find out why.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.