Every year, I would spend part of my school holidays at my grandparents’ house.

They believed deeply in education. Learning wasn’t something that happened only at school, it was part of everyday life.

My cousins and I would have spelling bees and storytelling competitions, all judged by my grandfather from his favourite armchair that rested against the north wall of the living room. My grandmother had a small device shaped like the map of Nigeria that she changed every morning before we woke up to display the day’s date. Under my grandfather’s desk were stacks of books piled on top of one another, both fiction and non-fiction.

This passion for learning had been passed down to my immediate family to the point that when my parents built their home, they had a room set aside as a library.

One afternoon during one of these holidays, my grandfather took the batteries out of the clock in his room. He was going to teach me how to tell the time.

He explained the difference between the long hand and the short hand. He taught me that the number nine secretly meant forty-five minutes, and that the position of the hands mattered more than the numbers themselves.

A few months later, I was back at school applying that knowledge to the little two-dimensional clock faces printed on my mathematics textbook.

Today, I wear a purple FitBit.

Most clocks I interact with are digital. My phone tells me the time. My laptop tells me the time. My watch tells me the time.

The skill my grandfather lovingly (and might I add, very patiently) taught me has become one I use less and less.

I once saw a video online where someone said, “Kids can’t read analog clocks anymore.”

They’re probably right, but I believe the sentiment is wrong.

“We’re losing our recipes”

This expression is usually used to say traditions seem to be disappearing, and that customs, skills and ways of living that once felt permanent but are slowly fading into history.

I sometimes wonder whether every generation has believed it was losing its recipes. History suggests we always think we’re witnessing decline when, more often than not, we’re witnessing adaptation and every generation seems to have its own version of the same complaint.

“Nobody writes in cursive anymore.”

“No one knows how to read a paper map.”

“AI is going to destroy literacy.”

Many believe that these are signs that people are becoming less intelligent, I believe that they’re signs that society has changed (but maybe I’m just biased because I was born in 2006).

It’s easy to assume that the skills we grew up learning are the ones that matter most.

But history suggests otherwise.

I remember learning how to use a logarithm table in high school. For anyone unfamiliar, these were books filled with logarithm values and trigonometric values. Before calculators became widely available, these tables were essential tools for solving mathematical problems. I also learned how to represent an equation as a graph.

By the time I learned these tools, they were already disappearing. A few years later, I would be generating graph equations on Desmos and solving logarithm problems in a fraction of the time I used to with a scientific calculator.

Yet there I was, learning how to navigate pages of numbers and extract values manually.

It was a fascinating skill. It required patience, attention and mathematical understanding. But it was also a skill that technology had already begun replacing. Scientific calculators and software made the process almost instant. I can’t remember the last time I saw a logarithm table. But that does not change the fact that were incredibly valuable for the world they belonged to and solved a problem that existed at the time.

The fact that valuable skills have always changed is not something that is uniquely modern.

When writing became widespread, Plato wrote about Socrates’ worry that it would weaken memory because people would no longer need to remember everything themselves.

“And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” – Plato, Phaedrus

The printing press was criticised for claims that it would overwhelm people with information. Calculators were supposed to ruin mathematics and GPS was supposed to ruin navigation.

Now AI is supposed to ruin literacy.

None of these concerns were completely irrational. The truth is that transformative technology is exactly that, and every technology creates new trade-offs.

But history rarely supports the idea that these tools make humanity broadly less capable. Actually, it seems that the real result is that they redefine which capabilities matter most.

I experienced this firsthand at university.

At the beginning of my university journey, AI was prohibited. It was treated as something that undermined learning, a tool that students might use to avoid doing the work themselves.

Then, only a few years later, I had an assignment that tested something completely different. We were assessed on the quality of our prompts, our ability to evaluate AI-generated information, and our judgement in deciding what was useful and what was unreliable.

AI is here, so the solution wasn’t to ask how far students could go without AI, but more to ask if we had the right skills to use it responsibly.

Calculators didn’t eliminate mathematics, they changed what mathematical ability looked like. Similarly, search engine didn’t eliminate research. It changed what research ability looked like. Gone are the days where you would need to spend days skimming through physical books and articles to find the supporting argument you need. Now, we have Google Scholar and Ctrl+F.

Just going back to analog clocks. Before these clocks were sundials, hourglasses and church bells. Those, too, became less central to everyday life.

We don’t think someone is unintelligent because they can’t tell the time from a sundial, but we simply recognise that the world has changed. I feel like this same principle should apply everywhere.

Few of us know how to shoe a horse, repair a steam engine or send a telegram. These skills were essential skills for a different world, but their obsoleteness should not be taken as evidence of declining intelligence but more as evidence that society has moved on.

I suspect every generation measures the next generation using yesterday’s skillset and we only notice the skills that have disappeared because they’re the ones we were taught.

However, what we often fail to notice are the entirely new skills that have taken their place. I might not great at posting letters, but I do know how to convert a word document to pdf.

My grandfather taught me how to read an analog clock because that knowledge belonged in the world he was helping me navigate at the time and my teachers taught me logarithm tables because mathematics was taught differently at the time.

Now, my university teaches me how to evaluate AI because the world has changed again.