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Notes -
I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].
I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.
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