My daughter told me this week about a conversation with one of her friends. The subject was whether it was possible to complete your homework without access to the internet. Before we all start to roll our eyes and talk about generations, it was a thoughtful conversation about whether the sources of data that were available to them offline would be sufficient versus the wealth of data available online.

I’ve been known to say that my children think they know everything, because they have Google. The smartphone and the search capability provide them with a surrogate brain and borrowed knowledge. Maybe there is something wrong with that, maybe there isn’t.

What I do question, is whether we are effectively outsourcing our decision making capability to technology and therefore losing the skills and experience to help us effectively and quickly work things out.

When I worked in a bar as a student, the landlord refused to have an electronic till. Instead we had one of the old push button ones with a cash drawer that pinged open with delight and the very real risk of losing a kidney. As a student of economics and accounting at the time, my maths was never stronger than when I was running mental totals of drinks orders for customers who would invariably use it as a chance to question your answer.

In the modern workplace, we rarely calculate anything ourselves. Walk around the streets of any town or city and you’ll see people looking at their phones to show them the direction. We are more likely to look at an app, than out of the window, to know the weather.

In some ways, if we’re using the liberation from the mundane to focus our minds on higher matter, the more complicated and meaningful topics, then you have to argue that this is a huge step forward. If the systemisation of the transactional allows us to learn, to be curious and thoughtful; to read, to think, to share, to talk and grow.

But if we are being led down the path of unconscious disempowerment and the destruction of creativity, problem solving and reduction of our innate ability to guesstimate, approximate and divine, then we need to think again.

If our liberation merely allows us the ability to take photos of our food and share them with people we have never met, to find out where we need to be, without knowing where we are, to be given an answer, without understanding the question. If our liberation does nothing more than reduce the sum of our parts, we have to question whether that is liberation at all. When we are beholden on something or someone else to allow us to fulfil our lives, we are more likely to find ourselves trapped, rather than free.