Dr. Friedman, have you written an article about a post scarcity society or the impossibility of it? With the recent technological developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, people are starting to talk about mass automation and mass unemployment more and more.
I am trying to hone my arguments and I currently believe that technological advancements will not lead to unemployment in the long term, just like the unemployment rate today is lower than 100 years ago, even though only a fraction of the people still work in agriculture.
I don't think I have. My guess is that a post scarcity world is not going to happen.
One way of looking at it is that we are already there, and there is still scarcity. McCloskey reports that the estimate of economic historians is that the real income of the developed world at present is twenty to thirty times what the global average was through most of history. From the standpoint of someone in the past, twenty times his real income feels like it would give him everything he could want. But once you adjust to our incredible income, it doesn't. My guess is that the same would be true of another twenty fold, or hundred fold, increase.
For sure you're correct there - if we were willing it live at the median living standard of year 1800 Americans, we could work 5 hours a week or less.
But we're social animals and we aren't willing - we need to keep up with the neighbors.
AI may however change that. All automation to date has made humans more productive and left unsolved things that humans can do. True AGI (let alone ASI) may change that - when machines can do literally EVERTYHING that humans can do, better and cheaper, humans may have a problem.
As long as humans own the machines (property rights) maybe not a big problem. But it seems likely that that won't hold for long.
What AI might do is to make capital more productive relative to labor. People can still do all the same productive things as before but, if what you want to do requires both labor and capital and what you have is labor, you may find that you have to pay a higher price for the capital input, give its owner a larger share of what you produce, than in the past.
IANAE but it seems to me that everything humans do, they try to do it better, even if it's boring and they just want to reduce the boredom. If tiddlywinks had professional games with million dollar prizes, contestants would get far beyond the ordinary. It's one of the reasons socialism always fails, that it can only work in a static society, and people aren't cut out for that.
All automation does is free people from boring work for more interesting work. The only question I have is how government will continue screwing it up. I expect the amount of work needed per week to live comfortably will always be roughly constant because people always want more. Some could live right now on 20 hour work weeks, but they wouldn't have all the modern niceties. In the near future, they could live that same old simple life on 10 hours a week -- but most people won't want to, and automation means that 40 hour weeks won't be nearly as boring as they were in 1950.
I think most people in the past worked considerably more than forty hours a week. I'm currently retired, and down to fourteen hours a week on writing projects such as this.
It’s always been a helpful skill, but historically there’d be far fewer applicants per job and far more internal promotions; processes have also got more formal. 40 years ago going to a consultant for CVs or interview technique would have sounded bizarre but is increasingly common for higher positions. 5+ interview rounds would have been similarly mad.
You raise an interesting point about typing being, perhaps, a transitional technology. It has been with us longer than the CD or DVD, but it may disappear. For some people it opened a, perhaps brief, window.
I recall having an online, text-based, chat with someone in the 1990s. She made some occasional grammatical errors, but they struck me as very atypical. I didn't immediately spot what was odd about them. After a while I asked if English was her only language. She responded that her first language was American Sign Language, and explained that it is based on English but has a simplified tense structure. That was when it dawned on me that literally none of her grammatical slips had been homophone errors, of the type we see so frequently in casual text-based conversation.
For her, text-based chat was the first opportunity she had ever had to socialize with people who did not know about her disability. As video and audio based communication online becomes more common, that window may close.
With speech to text, people can talk to her and she can read what they say, so audio is open to her. Not video if she were blind, but if she was using ASL she wasn't.
AI/CGI may open more windows, in that people with disabilities, warts, scars, or who just want privacy, can have the computer present a completely artificial image and voice and setting in video chats. I have long had an odd little fantasy that it would have been fun to keep my job life separate from my personal life, with different names, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. Same with online identities. Up until recently, it would have been a major hassle. It might not be for much longer.
Quite a lot of people online keep their online persona separate from their real space persona, avoiding any communication that would let people link them. In the groups I post in I am unusual in posting under my real name. That is a version of what you describe that is currently possible.
Similarly, a smart 12 year old can come across online as an adult.
Blue skying about where I might want to build my next getaway cabin far from the madding crowds, I started calculating how big a hydrogen filled balloon I'd need to place a stratoshack (Heck with you son's seasteads, I wanted a stratoshack! Grin.) 18 miles up in the stratosphere where it's weatherless and every day is a sunny day. Starting with math I haven't utilized for well over 20 years I realized my back of the enveloping would requiter many hours back and fourth between my shelves checking constants, verifying formulas, etc.
Hence I decided to ask open AI ChatGPT. Surprisingly in less than five minutes I had acceptable results. Most of that time was me rephrasing my queries, garbage in garbage out, ChatGPD did all the calcs in well less than thirty seconds.
Admittedly a trivial query but as I was dealing with numbers and established constants, the results were quickly verifiable.
If you want to look at my discussion & chat's work here it is; (https://jiminalaska.substack.com/p/getting-away-from-it-all) Of course it's simply a paper proof of concept, the four tons I'm lifting includes the balloon etc. but it appears scalable and no exotics or deus ex machina needed to get there
I was skeptical but I now admit AIs can be quite useful tools even today with still in their infancy but, as with any tool, care and caution is necessary.
Sight tangent; I wouldn't give up on longhand or hard copy books, I see such valuable in the foreseeable as well as the unforeseeable future. For example if the fit really hits the shan I content contend a group, members of with have at least a eight grade education could, with a set of early 1900s Audels Manuals in hand rebuild a 19th century civilization form the rubble of today or tomorrow.
The AI one made me giggle. Starting about a month ago, Youtube started recommending some AI movie trailers, like "Star Wars as 1950s film noir". A few were at least interesting, but OMG, the women were so exaggerated! It only took a couple of those before I only clicked the ones which shouldn't have had any adult women ... but The Wizard of Oz and the Jetsons were just as dumb.
I guess Youtube wised up to me wising up to them, and switched to recommending some one minute videos of a bikini babe in a canoe ... in the winter???? Well, only a minute, but two was all it took to swear off them. The second one had some title like "Panic in a canoe" which made me think it might involve a duck or fish adventure, but nope, just bikini babe paddling around. The water looks pretty good, and I'd always heard that water was one of the hardest things for CGI. Bikini babe herself looked pretty good, and makes me wonder how long til pure CGI/AI movies come along.
One of my fantasies is that the future of movies will be picking a script, casting it yourself, choosing options such as language, location, era, and it will generate the entire movie. You could also choose how much to randomize it, and save the random seed so you could watch the exact same movie again. Write your own scripts. Have it generate scripts from your options -- mystery, thriller, romcom, slow serious art film, silent film, the choices are endless. Add turning points to scripts, like some of those old adventure "pick a plot" books. The casting would be fun. Gossip is that Ronald Reagan was originally cast in "Casablanca", and it would be interesting to try changes like this. Make up your own cast and crew. Give Rick a southern accent, make him a Russian refugee.
And it would get rid of expensive Hollywood actors. Imagine choosing your cast and you see that Robert Redford wants $5 for a 30-year old version of him. Nuts to that! Pick some random beginner or even completely AI actor for 10 cents.
People all over the internet would offer their favorites with the original random seed and suggestions for changes.
I had imagined a less extreme version of your movies, one in which the author wrote the movie but all the actors were created by software, making movies as makable, by a single author, as novels are now.
That also suggests the possibility of software that turns a novel into a movie.
Keeping oneself comparatively safe while living in a recording panopticon, with tech that's capable of searching immense records to find people who violated some modern taboo twenty or more years before it was considered a problem. Bonus for keeping one's children safe, when childish indiscretions are all on record.
This is, of course, related to the general skill of keeping one's head down in any totalitarian regime.
I don't think Brin's transparent society, your panopticon, is a totalitarian society. It's unpleasant in a different but related way. And I suspect that searching the past for violations of recent taboos is going to lose much of its force once everyone can do it, hence everyone can see that everyone else is guilty of such violations.
I agree that it's not totalitarian. I just think the survival skills needed may be similar.
As for people backing off on picking on their evil neighbour, who dares to eat their egg from the wrong end, having been caught on camera doing so 20 years before egg eating became an issue - my read of human nature says they'll keep doing it, even while being loudly indignant that anyone applies similar rules to good people like themselves.
The question isn't whether they will complain about their neighbor but whether enough other people will take the complaint seriously to matter.
Now I'm imagining a program, probably AI. You put in a name and some identifying information, it finds examples of politically/religiously/socially incorrect things that person has done. When someone complains about which end of the egg you broke you put his identity into the program and point out that he once used the word "niggardly."
There's a social status thing also about who gets blamed, and who gets to do the blaming.
When my niece was in school, some of the popular girls in her class enjoyed themselves by teasing her about wearing "welfare shoes." She pointed out that one of their own gang was wearing the same shoes. That didn't matter, quoth the dominant girls, because "we like her".
Adults rarely admit to this kind of behaviour pattern, and its associated motivation quite so clearly. But I'm inclined to believe they still do the same thing. So to an extent, they'll attack whoever they want to, creating an excuse if they can't find one handy. But when they are just looking for some ego-boosting fun, they'll also pick the one with an obvious, convenient excuse.
I'm not sure how much not providing that excuse actually improves one's chances of being targeted. Possibly not all that much. Possibly a lot. It may depend on the specifics of the attackers' psyches.
One thing I'm certain: a lot of people enjoy hurting other people. Some of them nonetheless require an excuse so they can feel good about their recreational activities.
But I don't think it needs to be all that real. Witness for example the youths in my brother in law's home village, who somewhat routinely attacked strangers physically "because they looked queer".
Brin surprised me with his book, and I found I agreed with his recipe of allowing the public to see everything the government cameras see, especially what the government watchers were looking at. Knowing they were watching was creepy, but the scary part was not knowing how the government watchers were abusing them. It would be a lot more tolerable if the public can watch the watchers.
Keeping at least somewhat healthy in spite of the best efforts of the culture, including the built environment. Misinformation to the right of you, sugary sodas to the left of you, while the unwalkable environment volleys and thunders. A sedentary (desk) job with ridiculous hours, no time to get out to eat - let alone cook - and a cafeteria full of dubious food.
At least there's less in the way of outright contaminated food in the system than e.g. when The Jungle was published. Because very few of us are in a position to source our own food outside of the system.
I don't find the environment we both live in unwalkable. I walk about half an hour a day, usually near my house but, by preference, somewhere else so I will see new things.
Most of us are in a position to source our food, although not the ingredients, if it is important to us. And I am not sure what is dubious about the other-sourced food in the cafeteria. We have access to a much wider variety of food, in particular vegetables in the winter and meat in the spring, than people in the past, outside of tropical regions.
You remind me of one or two of the black pilled right wingers on a forum I post on (DSL). Different politics but the same anti-rosy glasses.
I do indeed have non-rosy glasses. I'm told it's even good for one's health, once one reaches a certain age. (Some news article years ago titled "a bah humbug a day keeps the doctor away", no more credible than any other newspaper health or science coverage.)
What I'm thinking of is the proportion of salt, sugar etc. Getting a not too bad diet out of ready made foods requires constant vigilance. Of course it's even worse when you have dietary restrictions, but bad enough without. It's also worse when the foods aren't labelled with their ingredients or nutritional data, as in just about every place serving prepared foods.
This was less of an issue when most households cooked, using raw ingredients. They could learn what to include or not include, possibly based on health but as likely based on whatever their parents did. Then it would just be a habit, modified eventually by bad news from a doctor. (e.g. "You need to be on a low sodium diet", in the case of my father.)
Somewhat related to "drinking from a fire hose" is knowing when to stop drinking. I have the habit of wanting to read all that is available to read on whatever topic is of interest to me. When content was limited, my attempt to read whatever was at hand was not that harmful. But these days, I could spend days on end reading or listening to talks beyond the point of diminishing marginal utility.
Knowing when to stop could be a valuable skill.
On the matter of typing: I find it much easier to type what I have to communicate than orally dictate. I suppose that is a matter of habit. Without a keyboard at my fingertips, I fear that I won't even know what to say.
It is interesting to speculate on what skills will best serve us in the future. I wonder whether several of the skills you listed may soon (relatively) be beyond the capabilities of a majority of the population.
-- discerning "true" information,
-- avoiding scams,
-- avoiding distorted perceptions,
-- distinguishing "true" images/video/media from fake ones, and
-- understanding the benefits of the plethora of education options.
As technology (primarily AI) advances, this set of skills may become beyond the reach of an average person. Perhaps a more important skill for many people will be understanding: (1) that they need help in understanding and navigating (making positive utility decisions in) life, and (2) who the people (or even AIs) are, that they have access to, who whose judgment they should trust more than their own.
Most people have always done your 2, with human authorities. Very few people who claim to believe in evolution could justify the belief from their own knowledge, very few religious believers could justify theirs.
Thank you for pointing out the lack of clarity in my proposals. Yes, people have historically consulted with others in making positive utility decisions in their lives, but there are degrees to which such consultations impact the final decisions. What I am referring to is that, in the future, I believe that it will be helpful to most people to throw even more analysis and decision making over the proverbial wall for others to make and for people to use less of their own agency.
For example, in deciding which insurance policy to purchase for my car, I might consult with friends, family, a few websites, and get a few quotes from different insurance agents. Once I had gathered all of this information, I would analyze the data and then make a decision on what insurance to purchase. It seems likely AI will erode whatever advantages I think I, and most people, have in gathering the data and performing the analysis.
My point is that (1) the skill of understanding how much (or, rather, how little) of one's own analsys should go into the decision process will be an important one as I expect this level to continue decreasing into the future, and (2) the skill of understanding which people or AIs to defer such analysis and decision making to will also be important to maximize one's utility.
In a nutshell, I am disagreeing with many of the skills you proposed because they may soon be beyond the capacity of most people to meaningfully acquire.
Dr. Friedman, have you written an article about a post scarcity society or the impossibility of it? With the recent technological developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, people are starting to talk about mass automation and mass unemployment more and more.
I am trying to hone my arguments and I currently believe that technological advancements will not lead to unemployment in the long term, just like the unemployment rate today is lower than 100 years ago, even though only a fraction of the people still work in agriculture.
I don't think I have. My guess is that a post scarcity world is not going to happen.
One way of looking at it is that we are already there, and there is still scarcity. McCloskey reports that the estimate of economic historians is that the real income of the developed world at present is twenty to thirty times what the global average was through most of history. From the standpoint of someone in the past, twenty times his real income feels like it would give him everything he could want. But once you adjust to our incredible income, it doesn't. My guess is that the same would be true of another twenty fold, or hundred fold, increase.
For sure you're correct there - if we were willing it live at the median living standard of year 1800 Americans, we could work 5 hours a week or less.
But we're social animals and we aren't willing - we need to keep up with the neighbors.
AI may however change that. All automation to date has made humans more productive and left unsolved things that humans can do. True AGI (let alone ASI) may change that - when machines can do literally EVERTYHING that humans can do, better and cheaper, humans may have a problem.
As long as humans own the machines (property rights) maybe not a big problem. But it seems likely that that won't hold for long.
Doesn't comparative advantage apply here as well as between nations? Even if AI can do everything better, it can't so everything equally well.
Correct.
What AI might do is to make capital more productive relative to labor. People can still do all the same productive things as before but, if what you want to do requires both labor and capital and what you have is labor, you may find that you have to pay a higher price for the capital input, give its owner a larger share of what you produce, than in the past.
IANAE but it seems to me that everything humans do, they try to do it better, even if it's boring and they just want to reduce the boredom. If tiddlywinks had professional games with million dollar prizes, contestants would get far beyond the ordinary. It's one of the reasons socialism always fails, that it can only work in a static society, and people aren't cut out for that.
All automation does is free people from boring work for more interesting work. The only question I have is how government will continue screwing it up. I expect the amount of work needed per week to live comfortably will always be roughly constant because people always want more. Some could live right now on 20 hour work weeks, but they wouldn't have all the modern niceties. In the near future, they could live that same old simple life on 10 hours a week -- but most people won't want to, and automation means that 40 hour weeks won't be nearly as boring as they were in 1950.
I think most people in the past worked considerably more than forty hours a week. I'm currently retired, and down to fourteen hours a week on writing projects such as this.
Applying for jobs.
It’s always been a helpful skill, but historically there’d be far fewer applicants per job and far more internal promotions; processes have also got more formal. 40 years ago going to a consultant for CVs or interview technique would have sounded bizarre but is increasingly common for higher positions. 5+ interview rounds would have been similarly mad.
You raise an interesting point about typing being, perhaps, a transitional technology. It has been with us longer than the CD or DVD, but it may disappear. For some people it opened a, perhaps brief, window.
I recall having an online, text-based, chat with someone in the 1990s. She made some occasional grammatical errors, but they struck me as very atypical. I didn't immediately spot what was odd about them. After a while I asked if English was her only language. She responded that her first language was American Sign Language, and explained that it is based on English but has a simplified tense structure. That was when it dawned on me that literally none of her grammatical slips had been homophone errors, of the type we see so frequently in casual text-based conversation.
For her, text-based chat was the first opportunity she had ever had to socialize with people who did not know about her disability. As video and audio based communication online becomes more common, that window may close.
With speech to text, people can talk to her and she can read what they say, so audio is open to her. Not video if she were blind, but if she was using ASL she wasn't.
AI/CGI may open more windows, in that people with disabilities, warts, scars, or who just want privacy, can have the computer present a completely artificial image and voice and setting in video chats. I have long had an odd little fantasy that it would have been fun to keep my job life separate from my personal life, with different names, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. Same with online identities. Up until recently, it would have been a major hassle. It might not be for much longer.
Quite a lot of people online keep their online persona separate from their real space persona, avoiding any communication that would let people link them. In the groups I post in I am unusual in posting under my real name. That is a version of what you describe that is currently possible.
Similarly, a smart 12 year old can come across online as an adult.
I'm finding chatgpt a surprisingly useful tool.
Blue skying about where I might want to build my next getaway cabin far from the madding crowds, I started calculating how big a hydrogen filled balloon I'd need to place a stratoshack (Heck with you son's seasteads, I wanted a stratoshack! Grin.) 18 miles up in the stratosphere where it's weatherless and every day is a sunny day. Starting with math I haven't utilized for well over 20 years I realized my back of the enveloping would requiter many hours back and fourth between my shelves checking constants, verifying formulas, etc.
Hence I decided to ask open AI ChatGPT. Surprisingly in less than five minutes I had acceptable results. Most of that time was me rephrasing my queries, garbage in garbage out, ChatGPD did all the calcs in well less than thirty seconds.
Admittedly a trivial query but as I was dealing with numbers and established constants, the results were quickly verifiable.
If you want to look at my discussion & chat's work here it is; (https://jiminalaska.substack.com/p/getting-away-from-it-all) Of course it's simply a paper proof of concept, the four tons I'm lifting includes the balloon etc. but it appears scalable and no exotics or deus ex machina needed to get there
I was skeptical but I now admit AIs can be quite useful tools even today with still in their infancy but, as with any tool, care and caution is necessary.
Sight tangent; I wouldn't give up on longhand or hard copy books, I see such valuable in the foreseeable as well as the unforeseeable future. For example if the fit really hits the shan I content contend a group, members of with have at least a eight grade education could, with a set of early 1900s Audels Manuals in hand rebuild a 19th century civilization form the rubble of today or tomorrow.
The AI one made me giggle. Starting about a month ago, Youtube started recommending some AI movie trailers, like "Star Wars as 1950s film noir". A few were at least interesting, but OMG, the women were so exaggerated! It only took a couple of those before I only clicked the ones which shouldn't have had any adult women ... but The Wizard of Oz and the Jetsons were just as dumb.
I guess Youtube wised up to me wising up to them, and switched to recommending some one minute videos of a bikini babe in a canoe ... in the winter???? Well, only a minute, but two was all it took to swear off them. The second one had some title like "Panic in a canoe" which made me think it might involve a duck or fish adventure, but nope, just bikini babe paddling around. The water looks pretty good, and I'd always heard that water was one of the hardest things for CGI. Bikini babe herself looked pretty good, and makes me wonder how long til pure CGI/AI movies come along.
One of my fantasies is that the future of movies will be picking a script, casting it yourself, choosing options such as language, location, era, and it will generate the entire movie. You could also choose how much to randomize it, and save the random seed so you could watch the exact same movie again. Write your own scripts. Have it generate scripts from your options -- mystery, thriller, romcom, slow serious art film, silent film, the choices are endless. Add turning points to scripts, like some of those old adventure "pick a plot" books. The casting would be fun. Gossip is that Ronald Reagan was originally cast in "Casablanca", and it would be interesting to try changes like this. Make up your own cast and crew. Give Rick a southern accent, make him a Russian refugee.
And it would get rid of expensive Hollywood actors. Imagine choosing your cast and you see that Robert Redford wants $5 for a 30-year old version of him. Nuts to that! Pick some random beginner or even completely AI actor for 10 cents.
People all over the internet would offer their favorites with the original random seed and suggestions for changes.
I might actually start watching movies again.
I had imagined a less extreme version of your movies, one in which the author wrote the movie but all the actors were created by software, making movies as makable, by a single author, as novels are now.
That also suggests the possibility of software that turns a novel into a movie.
Keeping oneself comparatively safe while living in a recording panopticon, with tech that's capable of searching immense records to find people who violated some modern taboo twenty or more years before it was considered a problem. Bonus for keeping one's children safe, when childish indiscretions are all on record.
This is, of course, related to the general skill of keeping one's head down in any totalitarian regime.
I don't think Brin's transparent society, your panopticon, is a totalitarian society. It's unpleasant in a different but related way. And I suspect that searching the past for violations of recent taboos is going to lose much of its force once everyone can do it, hence everyone can see that everyone else is guilty of such violations.
I agree that it's not totalitarian. I just think the survival skills needed may be similar.
As for people backing off on picking on their evil neighbour, who dares to eat their egg from the wrong end, having been caught on camera doing so 20 years before egg eating became an issue - my read of human nature says they'll keep doing it, even while being loudly indignant that anyone applies similar rules to good people like themselves.
The question isn't whether they will complain about their neighbor but whether enough other people will take the complaint seriously to matter.
Now I'm imagining a program, probably AI. You put in a name and some identifying information, it finds examples of politically/religiously/socially incorrect things that person has done. When someone complains about which end of the egg you broke you put his identity into the program and point out that he once used the word "niggardly."
There's a social status thing also about who gets blamed, and who gets to do the blaming.
When my niece was in school, some of the popular girls in her class enjoyed themselves by teasing her about wearing "welfare shoes." She pointed out that one of their own gang was wearing the same shoes. That didn't matter, quoth the dominant girls, because "we like her".
Adults rarely admit to this kind of behaviour pattern, and its associated motivation quite so clearly. But I'm inclined to believe they still do the same thing. So to an extent, they'll attack whoever they want to, creating an excuse if they can't find one handy. But when they are just looking for some ego-boosting fun, they'll also pick the one with an obvious, convenient excuse.
I'm not sure how much not providing that excuse actually improves one's chances of being targeted. Possibly not all that much. Possibly a lot. It may depend on the specifics of the attackers' psyches.
One thing I'm certain: a lot of people enjoy hurting other people. Some of them nonetheless require an excuse so they can feel good about their recreational activities.
But I don't think it needs to be all that real. Witness for example the youths in my brother in law's home village, who somewhat routinely attacked strangers physically "because they looked queer".
Brin surprised me with his book, and I found I agreed with his recipe of allowing the public to see everything the government cameras see, especially what the government watchers were looking at. Knowing they were watching was creepy, but the scary part was not knowing how the government watchers were abusing them. It would be a lot more tolerable if the public can watch the watchers.
Keeping at least somewhat healthy in spite of the best efforts of the culture, including the built environment. Misinformation to the right of you, sugary sodas to the left of you, while the unwalkable environment volleys and thunders. A sedentary (desk) job with ridiculous hours, no time to get out to eat - let alone cook - and a cafeteria full of dubious food.
At least there's less in the way of outright contaminated food in the system than e.g. when The Jungle was published. Because very few of us are in a position to source our own food outside of the system.
I don't find the environment we both live in unwalkable. I walk about half an hour a day, usually near my house but, by preference, somewhere else so I will see new things.
Most of us are in a position to source our food, although not the ingredients, if it is important to us. And I am not sure what is dubious about the other-sourced food in the cafeteria. We have access to a much wider variety of food, in particular vegetables in the winter and meat in the spring, than people in the past, outside of tropical regions.
You remind me of one or two of the black pilled right wingers on a forum I post on (DSL). Different politics but the same anti-rosy glasses.
I do indeed have non-rosy glasses. I'm told it's even good for one's health, once one reaches a certain age. (Some news article years ago titled "a bah humbug a day keeps the doctor away", no more credible than any other newspaper health or science coverage.)
What I'm thinking of is the proportion of salt, sugar etc. Getting a not too bad diet out of ready made foods requires constant vigilance. Of course it's even worse when you have dietary restrictions, but bad enough without. It's also worse when the foods aren't labelled with their ingredients or nutritional data, as in just about every place serving prepared foods.
This was less of an issue when most households cooked, using raw ingredients. They could learn what to include or not include, possibly based on health but as likely based on whatever their parents did. Then it would just be a habit, modified eventually by bad news from a doctor. (e.g. "You need to be on a low sodium diet", in the case of my father.)
Somewhat related to "drinking from a fire hose" is knowing when to stop drinking. I have the habit of wanting to read all that is available to read on whatever topic is of interest to me. When content was limited, my attempt to read whatever was at hand was not that harmful. But these days, I could spend days on end reading or listening to talks beyond the point of diminishing marginal utility.
Knowing when to stop could be a valuable skill.
On the matter of typing: I find it much easier to type what I have to communicate than orally dictate. I suppose that is a matter of habit. Without a keyboard at my fingertips, I fear that I won't even know what to say.
It is interesting to speculate on what skills will best serve us in the future. I wonder whether several of the skills you listed may soon (relatively) be beyond the capabilities of a majority of the population.
-- discerning "true" information,
-- avoiding scams,
-- avoiding distorted perceptions,
-- distinguishing "true" images/video/media from fake ones, and
-- understanding the benefits of the plethora of education options.
As technology (primarily AI) advances, this set of skills may become beyond the reach of an average person. Perhaps a more important skill for many people will be understanding: (1) that they need help in understanding and navigating (making positive utility decisions in) life, and (2) who the people (or even AIs) are, that they have access to, who whose judgment they should trust more than their own.
Most people have always done your 2, with human authorities. Very few people who claim to believe in evolution could justify the belief from their own knowledge, very few religious believers could justify theirs.
Thank you for pointing out the lack of clarity in my proposals. Yes, people have historically consulted with others in making positive utility decisions in their lives, but there are degrees to which such consultations impact the final decisions. What I am referring to is that, in the future, I believe that it will be helpful to most people to throw even more analysis and decision making over the proverbial wall for others to make and for people to use less of their own agency.
For example, in deciding which insurance policy to purchase for my car, I might consult with friends, family, a few websites, and get a few quotes from different insurance agents. Once I had gathered all of this information, I would analyze the data and then make a decision on what insurance to purchase. It seems likely AI will erode whatever advantages I think I, and most people, have in gathering the data and performing the analysis.
My point is that (1) the skill of understanding how much (or, rather, how little) of one's own analsys should go into the decision process will be an important one as I expect this level to continue decreasing into the future, and (2) the skill of understanding which people or AIs to defer such analysis and decision making to will also be important to maximize one's utility.
In a nutshell, I am disagreeing with many of the skills you proposed because they may soon be beyond the capacity of most people to meaningfully acquire.