I've seen a few theories suggesting the technology has already encouraged compartmentalization of information : it has become more vital to remember how or where to find data, than to remember the data itself, if the data is believed to be readily accessible. (There is some evidence, but the studies have the typical issues of mainstream social psychology.) This would include most forms of social data.
Reputation and related network effects are dramatically different today than in the recent past. I'd expect (95% confidence) that whatever successors we see to smartphones (whether Glass or something else) will continue that trend. I'd expect, albeit with low confidence (~75%), that people have greater ability to connect several different names to one personality. Where it was once a specialty skill (aliases, the professional writing community), it's increasingly common for anyone who wants to maintain an online social presence.
Several skills are somewhat temporary. People are less capable of remember phone numbers today than they were twenty years ago, who in turn were much more capable of associating seven- or ten-digit strings to names than the people before them (even adjusting for these numbers being built to be memorable). There are a number of other less generally used versions of such skills : four-triplet memorization is standard among network technicians under IPv4, but will likely degrade as (if) IPv6 becomes common in consumer environments.
There are a number of other less generally used versions of such skills : four-triplet memorization is standard among network technicians under IPv4, but will likely degrade as (if) IPv6 becomes common in consumer environments.
Google measures global IPv6 usage at 3.5%, up from 1.5% a year ago and 0.65% a year before that. That's more than doubling as a percentage year-over-year.
Adoption is markedly stronger in the US and parts of Western Europe than the rest of the world. 7% of usage from the US, 8% from Germany, and 18% from Belgium is via IPv6; versus...
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.