Life Skills: When Technology Starts Thinking for Us

Lessons from a Vulcan Bomber, a Map of Europe and the Skills We’re Losing

I have been thinking a lot about technology and its affect on society recently. Not the headline stuff about AI changing everything, but a quieter question underneath. What happens when we start relying on the machine more than we rely on ourselves?

I believe AI has a huge role to play in modern life. It already does.. It is already woven into the way we work, write and make decisions. But there is a fine line between using a tool and letting it shape us. Between sharpening our minds and outsourcing them.

A memory from my early days in the Army comes back to me whenever I think about this. When I served in Germany, every service person had the same item stuffed into the glovebox of their tax-free car. A large folding map that covered Germany, northern France, Holland and Belgium. The British Forces Germany map. It was dog-eared, often stained with spilled coffee, and absolutely essential.

This was long before smartphones, Sat Nav or Google Maps. Nobody was going to warn you that the notoriously busy Route 2 near Herford had come to a standstill. You had to read the autob, plan your detour and trust your own sense of direction. I often wonder how many drivers today could read a map with any confidence. Does it matter? Maybe it does. It is a small example of how easily a simple, practical skill can slip away when technology offers a shortcut.

That same thought followed me into my current reading. It will surprise nobody that it is a military book. This time it is Vulcan 607 by Rowland White, a remarkable account of Operation Black Buck during the Falklands conflict. On the surface, it is the story of a bombing raid on Stanley airfield. In reality, it is a story about persistence, bravery, invention, instinct and what happens when people are forced to think for themselves.

The Avro Vulcan and the Ingenuity of RAF Crews

The Vulcan was a marvel of British aeronautical engineering. A Cold War bomber designed with slide rules, not software. By 1982 the Vulcan was close to retirement. Argentina had taken the Falkland Islands, known as Las Malvinas in Buenos Aires, and the RAF suddenly needed an aircraft that could fly thousands of miles across the South Atlantic. The Vulcan was the only thing that came close. A Vulcan could carry a far larger payload than its smaller fighter cousins, known as the Harrier.

There was one problem. The Vulcan had not been designed for the job.

The crews of the Vulcan bombers and Victor tankers had to relearn tactics and procedures they thought they would never use again. Air to air refuelling was essential for the mission, yet the Vulcans had not taken fuel in the air for years. Their refuelling probes had been filled with resin by engineers confident the capability would never be needed again. The solution was part detective work, part stubbornness. RAF teams scoured museums around the world for spare parts. They rebuilt the old capability piece by piece, guided by instinct, memory and a willingness to improvise.

What struck me was not the scale of the mission, impressive as it was, but the mindset behind it. These were people who had spent years inside a routine suddenly forced to wake up their instincts. They had to think, not check. They trusted judgement, not a system. They created solutions on the fly, guided by lived experience rather than an algorithm telling them what to do.

After travelling over 3,000 nautical miles and with air-to-air refuelling taking place a total of 14 times, including seven times for the bomber, the Vulcan arrived at Port Stanley on the 1^st May 1982 and dropped 21 1,000-pound bombs with one bomb causing damage to the runway.

And that is where the link to modern technology becomes clear.

We are drifting into an age of passive thinking. Apps and systems tell us where to walk, when to sleep, what to buy and who to follow. AI can produce a paragraph before we have even worked out what we truly think. Convenience has become a way of life, yet convenience rarely builds capability. The more we rely on automation, the less muscle we give to judgement.

One thing the military teaches you is that intuition is a survival tool. You learn to read a room, sense a change in the wind, trust the feeling that something is off. You sharpen your awareness because it matters. There’s no short cuts to learning your trade, whether you’re a tactical sniper or an aircraft engineer. The analogue world demanded understanding. You had to know how the system worked, how to navigate it and how to fix it when it failed. The digital world often asks us simply to comply.

Operation Black Buck was built on inconvenience. Nothing worked, nothing fit and nothing made sense. Yet that friction woke people up. It forced them to think in new ways. It created space for problem solving, not passivity.

There is a modern parallel here. Drop most people into a GPS dead zone and they are lost. Remove the app and the workflow collapses. In many workplaces, decisions are shaped more by dashboards than by human judgement. Even in writing, the temptation is to let the machine offer ideas before we have wrestled with our own.

AI is an extraordinary tool, and I use it openly, especially when it comes to numbers. But it should never do all the thinking for us. If we forget how to improvise, how to judge, how to stay creative in difficult moments, we lose something essential. Something human. Something practical.

In 1982, a handful of pilots, navigators and engineers turned a near retired museum piece into a strategic weapon. Not because a system told them how, but because they refused to believe something was impossible. They trusted their craft and their instincts.

I wonder how many people have the skills to survive in an analogue world. Technology will shape our future. The intelligence that will guide us through it must still be our own.

AI can help us think. It shouldn’t replace the thinking.