but the less we do, the less we learn
I completely agree. Take adding or substracting for instance, since professional cashiers have that solved with machines, sometimes they do not understand you are giving them more money than required to get less coins in your change.
Take regular citizens and ask to add two or three numbers without a calculator and many will fail. There are two problems on that, first we stop using our brain, and this means way more dependency on machines and second we forget to keep our brain training and we end up becoming way less self sufficient. Both things are critical as at some point we loose many of the skills we had.
Ask a teenager how to use a paper map or how to find info without asking google or chatgpt and they have no clue there are libraries with enciclopedias or any other 'old' source of info and the most dangerous part is that they take the digital responses from AI for granted as it that was the real truth
The other is that we never build the skills in the first place, like many kids today. And those brain structures get used for other things, not just the task of adding and subtracting etc.
Was just talking about this the other day. Many, many people struggle to follow something like that.