For thousands of years, the human race has slowly advanced by learning and mastering professions and grouping into cities allowing specializations. These trades were passed directly and through books. But everything until recently began with the ground up. Human labor to mine and gather core materials. Human labor to design and create electronics. And computer programming, from binary to what we have today. But something is about to change......
Computers and programming are rapidly evolving and robotics is now in play. Computers began with binary coding, and there are still programmers alive today that were involved with that. Websites were initially developed hand coding HTML, etc. Now applications and templates handle that. Robotics and the future will automate many things that had required human labor and thinking. As technology advances, the core components and building blocks are automated and tailed onto the previous advancements. As the years go by, and stack upon stack of technology happens, it will be impossible for people then to learn and understand all of the steps and master them up to what is current. Many things are becoming electronic, and less need of books.
Now imagine 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000 years from now all technology that was based on the developments of our time are forgotten but used from AI, automation, robotics, etc. Clothing, food, resource gathering, all largely automated as well. Human civilization is well advanced and all occupations from our time period are the equivalent to when people would spin wool to make cloth, black smiths to create tools, etc, all things of the past.
A catastrophe then happens, a global EMP, which destroys all electronics. Without the technology, people have long forgot farming, hunting, building, gathering resources by hand. Most all if not all of that knowledge by then is electronic based. All technology and electronics need to be redeveloped from scratch. No existing or older devices work. But prior to all of that, people need to figure out how to farm, hunt, eat, make clothes, etc, how to survive without the technology.
Perhaps this is a form of how some advanced ancient civilizations vanished. A large scale plague or disaster wiped out all of the skilled tradesmen and they had to start again from scratch?
It makes me wonder if humans will advance and only continually advance, then spread to other planets and always keep advancing. Or if an endless cycle will happen in which building up to becoming completely reliant on technology and advancing past that technology to the point that when inevitable catastrophe's happen, they start all over again.