Is Technology dumbing us down?

Scene-1:

Boarding a cab at Bangalore, I asked my Uber driver the direction towards Majestic railway station, to figure out if we had to take a U-turn. The cabbie didn't have a clue, and just keyed in the destination into his handheld map and waited for the route map to show up. This has been a common occurrence in the past few months, wherein the cab drivers don't have a directional sense of the destination, leave alone the exact route map. Is it any coincidence that this was always with Uber or Ola cabs?

Scene-2:

On a recent family pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi in Jammu, our family of 6 was doing the 16 km hike to the hill temple. Midway, we got split into 2 groups and lost track of each other amidst the heavy crowd. As all mobiles were deposited in the temple cloak room, and public announcements were to no avail, the only way to reunite looked like calling a common mobile number, in this case my sister's who was not travelling. One of the 2 groups remembered the number and called from a public phone to report location, while none in the other group could recall any of our relative's number. After a small ordeal, we were re-united, but the lesson was clear. Hasn't the convenience of mobile contacts & speed dialing made us forget numbers of even our loved ones?

Scene-3:

I double up usage of my email inbox as an activity tracker to track open actions through unread emails. Once while clearing up the inbox, I accidentally clicked 'mark all as read' and in an instant all my pending actions vanished into thin air. I was left clueless on where I needed to act next. Have you heard of colleagues mention about missing a meeting, since an event did not show up in his or her calendar? 

Haven't you personally faced something similar? Do such scenarios look increasingly familiar, of late? We are in an age where documents are auto-saved, urls are bookmarked, machine recommendations pop up for everything - what you might want to buy, who you would want to befriend, birthdays you shouldn't forget, news you might be interested in reading. With the touted Google-now and army of digital assistants, this is only going to get worse. Are we losing our natural instinct or means to search and fend for ourselves? Is technology slowly making us too dependent and inept? 

I'm in no way advocating against use of technology, since I'm very much a part of the tribe that prides itself on teaching machines to make decisions and 'simplify' things for humans.  Nor am I talking about a singularity or a post-apocalyptic world (end of active human cognition), though that looks like a distinct possibility. I'm only calling attention to the fact that our memory, senses and other natural instincts are getting dampened. We are becoming gleefully unaware of the world around us, unless we get a 'notification'. 

This could be avoided with little steps, without compromising on the convenience of technology. Once in a while, switch off the GPS and try driving on your own, to notice landmarks & keep your sense of direction active. For a couple of days every few months, delete important numbers and make yourself key them in to start remembering them. Every now and then take time to spend days, interact with people and recall events without technology's help, to keep your natural instincts sharp and well-oiled. This list can be expanded to cover every aspect of your life that leverages technology for convenience or productivity. Perhaps, this will even keep you prepared for the coming singularity!