Yeah. “Hey Siri what’s the square root of 612?”
It’s hard to mourn the loss of those skills, like many others, from flint knapping to coding with punch cards. We’ve progressed to a point where we have the luxury to specialize and pursue higher arts like laser cutting.
If we all knew how to use a slide rule we wouldn’t even have this forum, we’d never have built the toolset it took to get here if we didn’t move past that.
Haven’t moved to Siri or Alexa yet. Don’t like talking to people or even the wife’s dog. And Siri can be a smartass.
Yeah ask her if she can beatbox, it’s pretty funny.
But seriously it’s useful when your hands are full.
I ask Siri to covert measurements or do other math when I’m in the middle of something.
It’s also nice to ask like “what’s the high temperature today” when you’re getting dressed, etc.
Definitely not a necessity but it does have its uses.
Oh I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t have moved on. I was a very early calculator user (& got grief for not being fair to the other kids). But I’m always interested in the secondary & tertiary effects of change. In this case there’s a demonstrable reduction in the ability of people to estimate answers to math problems.
It’s similar to automatic cash registers - no sense of what the total ought to be or why it might be wrong. I see it every day. My local convenience store had fountain sodas any size for 99 cents except for the largest size is 49 cents extra. No one was concerned that it rang up as $1.69 every time. Explain it and there’s a blank look. They finally changed the sign (no one could figure out how to reprogram the register or they decided most people were okay paying the extra that there was no point I guess).
GPS units are starting to do the same thing with people’s ability to find their way someplace without one. Directional sense and the ability to create mental maps of their position relative to other things is declining.
Would I advocate for no calculators, computers, cash registers or GPS units? Nope, but I’m not surprised when I notice people are becoming less mentally adept 
There are a lot of areas where the "new’ thing is of lower quality result, but the one that drove me most was that a hand file could clean up jewelry faster and better than a rubber wheel on a power tool as the rubber wheel was a circle working on a circle that they would only touch at the point of contact and slight differences in work effect would leave bouncy gouges rather than a smooth curve. A minor point I guess as most folk would not notice where the file would foster a curve by its natural action. The prime pont however was that the time and effort was actually the same and the file had much better control but the difference in moving your hand versus moving it less while the tool always threatened damage was a difference few others thought about.
The laser does provide precision you cannot achieve with a hand saw, just as the computer working at 10 decimal points works better than a slide rule where you struggle for two but by letting the machine do the job, both natural mistakes like the 21 cent over charge or the burning Glowforge are unintended risks and worse bad actors can do serious damage and nobody would notice,
@evansd2… somehow I ended up clicking on something and the pencil was not there. Then… BAM! There it was!
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