In 2015, Shannon Vallor wrote a paper about technology and moral de-skilling; it is even more relevant now than it was then. This is my take on her argument, extrapolated to 2026.
* Technological changes (as well as social ones) modify the way we spend our time and the types of activities we engage in
* This creates a process of upskilling and deskilling, where we (individually, and as a society) gain new sets of skills while others atrophy - this happens both intentionally, and as an inevitable effect of how we now spend our time
* Acting in accordance with our morals is a skill - it requires intention, practice at recognizing the "right" actions in ambiguous situations, experience to predict outcomes of our choices, and sometimes self-restraint to act against our immediate self-interest in service of outcomes that align with our morals
* The more we use machines and automation for tasks that have a moral dimension, the more we engage in a process of moral deskilling of ourselves
Evidence of many types of deskilling are all around us; skills that used to be common because of their necessity, like knitting, woodworking, hunting, food foraging, etc. are relegated to the margins, have become the realm of specialists, or are treated as hobbies, because we have mostly automated away the need for large segments of the population to engage in them.
Vallor uses examples of warfare (offloading decisions about killing to machines) and caregiving (offloading physical, mental, and emotional support to robots, chatbots, etc.) as cases where we are likely to morally deskill our society; these were somewhat hypothetical in 2015, but it seems clear that we're well along this path in 2026. I think the judicial system, law enforcement, employment decisions, and allocation of resources such as healthcare, education, and social services would also make good examples.The more we automate or outsource these activities, the less good we get at performing them in ways that align with our morals.
While it's easy to think of this in the context of actions that have a clear, classical connection to morality, it operates in much smaller, and more pervasive ways as well. The way we act towards each other - whether we respect each others' dignity, autonomy, time, and humanity. The way we use common, finite, and shared resources. The decisions, large and small, we make about our interactions with the natural environment. Every one of these, and more, has a moral dimension, and the more we put machines between us and the practices of deciding and acting, the more we erode our ability to make moral decisions and to act morally.
We consider people who are skilled at acting morally to be virtuous, and those who are not as having poor moral character. As individuals and as a society, our current technological choices are morally deskilling us, reducing our moral character.
Maybe we should re-consider our relationship with some of this technology, lest we end up in a future where moral reasoning is something that is just done as a hobby, idly, while sitting in a boring lecture, like knitting.
https://bhaven.org/uploads/3/4/0/3/34038663/vallor2015_article_moraldeskillingandupskillingin.pdf
