At what point does something become considered “the old-fashioned way?” “The old-fashioned way” for many of us is a time before Covid, before 9/11, before the age of cellphones or even the Internet. This can look different depending on who you ask. I recently asked my nine-year old son to make believe he was on the phone, and he promptly placed his flat palm against the side of his face. What’s even more surprising was when I asked him to hang up, and he lightly pressed his pointy finger against his other palm without making a sound. The days of using your pinky and thumb as an imaginary phone appear to be numbered, and the satisfying “click” of hanging up has gone away, too. Either way, nobody talks on the phone anymore, which is considered “the old-fashioned way” to many people.
My personal view of “The Old-Fashioned Way” might look similar to what’s been floating around on social media for the last month or so. I’m talking about the reels or short clips of old blurry pictures from the 90’s scrolling by as “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls plays in the background. Perhaps you’ve made one of these reels if you’re old enough. Perhaps your parents made one. Movie stars, musicians, and influencers are churning out these retrospective reminiscent videos and racking up the views while simultaneously bringing us all back to a time when things were different. A time when things were simpler. It was a time of mixtapes, bunny ears, dog runs, roll-down windows, card catalogs, encyclopedias, rotary phones, and riding bikes until the streetlights came on.
This was back when emotional intelligence was a real thing, and artificial intelligence (A.I.) was a plot line from sci-fi horror movies. Things are so vastly different now, and I consider myself lucky to have not only become a teenager before the Internet was born, but also to have finished college before A.I. had become so engrained in so many aspects of our lives from dating to recipes to research. In just writing this piece, I’ve had Microsoft’s A.I. tool interrupt my process with several wrong suggestions, with the most egregious suggestion telling me I should fix my first reference of the “Internet” to “It’s”. Luckily, I am able to recognize how wrong that suggestion is. But what if I didn’t?
In a world far-too reliant on technology far-too advanced for us to truly understand, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to know when it works well and when it doesn’t work at all. In October of 2025, the British Broadcasting Corporation found A.I. chatbots make mistakes. A lot of mistakes. They found A.I. chatbots to be wrong 45% of the time. Now, six months later, it’s probably safe to say there has been some improvement. However, even if A.I. services were 100% accurate, the drawbacks are still there. For one: relying on A.I. prevents us from learning the processes we use it for on our own.
To add to that, when we use A.I. to do our work (or even parts of our work) for us, we lose our own voice. We lose the months and years of experience that make us experts in our field. We lose the credibility found in building a career for ourselves. We block our own learning of the most basic concepts that are foundational in nature. In becoming so dependent on this new tool of the future, we lose the ability to do and learn things the “Old-Fashioned Way”.
