Tools: the Perils of Foregetfullness
“An anthropomorphous ape, if he could take a dispassionate view of his own case, would admit that though he could form an artful plan to plunder a garden—though he could use stones for fighting or for breaking open nuts, yet that the thought of fashioning a stone into a tool was quite beyond his scope.”
To humans, Tools are extensions of the body. To animals, it may be similar, as tools do grant them additional powers. Tools grant their users specific powers; spears and arrows increase the reach of our arms, pulleys and levers multiply the strength of our muscles.
Tool-use is common in nature, tool-making is not
Less common is our human ability to gradually build up on one another’s innovations and combine tools together. It is an organic process through which humans innovated ways to produce, control, and use the tool. This is how we came to increasingly control fire; we are the only "fire maker" that we know of.
We're not the only fire user.
Other species know how to use fire but none can control it, let alone produce it. A “Fire Hawk” flushes out prey from the underbrush by starting a small fire, but it Hawk still needs to find that smoldering kindling.
Fire hawks in Australia's Northern Territory
Humans, on the other hand, can generate the spark that ignites, grow it to the scale needed, and use it to unlock other resources. Fire is “Man’s red flower”; only humans can turn use it to extract tar from birch bar, and turn flint points and wooden staffs into the Neanderthal spear... till we don't know how to do that anymore.
Forgetfulness is key to our ability to build-up on innovations.
The modern word amplifies this nature, with complex technologies that distribute know-how across many individuals. The information age, where electronic data storage can be readily erased or modified, accelerated this tendency. As recently as 2000, the United States “had lost knowledge of how to manufacture” a key component of their strategic Trident missiles.
The “secret sauce” to make fogbank was lost.
Fogbank
This was in part in efforts to protect the knowledge. The material, its composition, its use in the weapon, and the process itself were all classified. As a result, responsible agencies kept “few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s.”
This was also, in large part, through attrition, as “almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left.”
...and this forgetfulness may be more widespread than we think
We do need to change how we retain information, and therefore how we learn and use