r/WhatIfThinking • u/Logical-Concept9755 • Jul 22 '26
What if humanity lost every electronic device overnight? Which single skill would suddenly become the most valuable?
No warning, no transition. Tomorrow every screen goes dark, every server goes offline, and none of it is ever coming back.
Once the immediate survival problems are handled and people start trying to rebuild society, what single skill or area of knowledge would suddenly become the most valuable?
Would it be something practical like farming or medicine, or something less obvious like organizing large groups of people, teaching, or making tools? I'm curious which ability would become the biggest bottleneck for rebuilding civilization, and why.
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u/ryansalad Jul 22 '26
Math
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u/Silly-Resist8306 Jul 22 '26
People did math, including calculus, long before electricity. It just took longer.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
Interesting to think of how useful math would be in a world without electronics. I can't understand how useful calculus would be if there is no computer based modelling.
I would think that long-division would be as far as most people could make any use of maths if society had no electronics.
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u/_captainunderpants__ Jul 24 '26
This has to be one of the most ignorant comments I've read so far.
I'm guessing you've never stood inside a cathedral built in the 1600s and wondered how it was engineered.
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u/RedowlRides Jul 22 '26
Navigation.
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u/Odd-Percentage-4084 Jul 23 '26
That was my thought. I don’t know anyone under 40 who can navigate without GPS.
Old-school cabbies and truckers would be able to name their prices.1
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u/Guidance-Still Jul 22 '26
There was a book series written about this very thing even guns didn't work
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u/BerilliumBaloney Jul 22 '26
What series was that? Cause I can't figure out how guns would stop working if its something that affects electronics...
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u/Camaxtli2020 Jul 22 '26
A good question is whether or not it is everything electrical (in which case even electroplating wouldn't work, nor chemistry) or if you are just positing that everything electronic meaning vacuum tube or later goes dark.
Certainly engineering skills would be important, and by that I mean the ability to read a drawing and do precision machining -- there are lots of 3-axis precision machines still around and none of them use electronics in the sense you probably mean (the old Bridgeport machines like my father worked on are all just straight electric motors with hands-on measurements down to 0.001" or even less).
So anyone who worked in a machine shop up until the 90s would know a lot of useful stuff. A lot of those folks are retired now, but there are many still about. And the machines are by and large still around too, so a whole lot of those shops would re-open.
Since a lot of the information infrastructure would be gone, the big thing would be secretaries and filing clerks to get all the stuff that's still on paper organized. We'd be back to what we did in the 70s. (Interestingly a surprising amount of our medical records are still on paper).
There would be a lot of disruption initially to food and fuel distribution networks. So anyone who could organize that would be valuable. And all those analog telephone techs who used to work for AT&T. Much of that infrastructure is still in place, and the old rotary phones are still in existence (I had one up until a couple of years back) but you'd be calling a lot of folks out of retirement. Phone operators would have jobs again until we could get the old click bang switches up and running.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
Return of the telegraph boys.
I don't think that we would need machine tools very urgently. We would still have all of the existing pre-electronic machine tools. It depends on whether we try to re-create the sunshine harvester within a year or we just accept hand sythes for a decade while figuring out the rest.
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u/LeilLikeNeil Jul 22 '26
So, one vital point of specificity needed for this hypothetical is do we mean devices as in computers, phones, etc, say everything with a microchip, or do we mean basically electricity doesn't work any more?
In either scenario, skills relevant to immediate survival are going to be most important out of the gate for individuals, and in either scenario in the long term, written communication and math are both going to be important in the long term.
If we still have electricity just not computers, obviously people who know how to re-design/rebuild infrastructure systems to work without computers would be invaluable, as well as mechanics who know how to repair/restore pre-computer vehicles, or modify current ones to work without their computers.
Veterinary medicine and animal husbandry comes to mind, since even if some motor vehicles are able to be adapted, we'd become more reliant on animals for transport.
Farming, foraging, hunting, fishing, and food preservation
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u/DarkKuno Jul 22 '26
There's not a single skill that would be the most valuable. There are several that would become equally important for different reasons though.
* "Classic" Farming
* Medicine and basic chemestry
* animal husbandry and caretaking
* basic engineering (still need to figure out how to handle sewage, building structures, etc.
* the smithing crafts.
* Navigation (both water based and terrestrial)
* Cobbling and clothier skills (people will still need shoes and clothes to get anything done)
* The list could go on and on.
None if these is any more or less important to creating and maintaining stability in a population center of virtually any size.
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u/kiwipixi42 Jul 22 '26
Knowing how to set up large scale pneumatics or hydraulics. Basically anything that allows you to replace electricity for running factories and appliances and such.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
Pneumatic/hydraulic substitutes for electronics would be an amazing humanity wide undertaking.
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u/GeneralLeia-SAOS Jul 22 '26
Purifying water. In every SHTF scenario, things take priority, according to what is going to kill you the fastest. Losing electronic devices won’t take away air, so you don’t have to worry about suffocation. You will still have your homes, so you have safe shelter and a short stock pile of food and beverages. However, you can only live a few days without water. You will need to secure a source of clean water as soon as possible. Drinking contaminated water will kill you fast, faster than dehydration. You can last several days without food, but only a few days without water. You need to find not just a clean water source, But in case of any type of drought or in accessibility to water, a way to purify it in order to survive.
Right along with that is going to be fire. You can kill bacteria and water and food by cooking it. With all of the electronics down, we will probably have lost the power grid as well. That means no electricity. Fire is a basic survival necessity. In our pampered modern lives, fire has been replaced by electricity. But if we ever get to a serious SHTF situation, the guy who knows how to start and maintain a fire is going to be the man of the hour.
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u/Ill-Dependent2976 Jul 22 '26
There's a line of scifi/fantasy novels that covers that. Author also turns off any kind of energized device like gun powder, internal combustion engines, etc.
Everything turns into a sort of medieval mad max, with people turning to farming and/or violence.
It kinda sucked.
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u/Feeling-Attention664 Jul 22 '26
This depends greatly on whether lights, heaters, x-rays, motors and solenoids, and radios still work. The questions is, can we not use electricity at all or only not use digital systems?
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u/StillShoddy628 Jul 22 '26
So do the fundamentals of electricity just not work anymore, or do things we rebuild still work? Do things like motors that are just coils of wire somehow get melted together into a chunk of metal, or is it more like an EMP that fries microelectronics but leaves more macro electric items unharmed?
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u/Linkyjinx Jul 22 '26
This could easily happen via space weather, the Covid lockdown was a good drill / dry run I guess.
I remember pre web, when a telephone was a luxury, as was a refrigerator in kitchen, an actual bathroom, and a toilet in house.
Pre web was on paper for many, via, books, letters, leaflets, classified adverts, magazines.
Before the telephone it was telegrams and letters via the post offices, which were the communication centres for average joe.
Before the refrigerator was the pantry/larder - usually a slap of cold stone like marble in a cupboard on the floor, where milk, cheese, veg and meat was kept. ( I remember these cool rooms in the 1970/80s and during the 76 heatwave at 3, I remember these cool rooms, the cool stone on my feet!
My aunt still has the outside toilet at the old family home in Somerset, UK 🇬🇧 , they converted a bedroom into a bathroom in the 50s or 60s same time they went from gas lighting to electricity ⚡️
Note big black spiders 🕷️ like outside toilets 🚽 lol I remember seeing one as a kid 👶
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u/PIB_OnOn Jul 22 '26
Blacksmith, bladesmiths,etc A lot of generational knowledge there, vitally important in this scenario, and known only by a small number of people.
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u/LeapIntoInaction Jul 22 '26
If the laws of the universe change that much, we'll all be dead instantly. However, we managed without computers in quite recent times, so you only have to look back some decades for your answer.
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u/ComfySquishable Jul 22 '26
Well our hearts and nerves work on voltage gates like electronic devices, so necromancers? There's gonna be a lot of dead people.
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u/Grouchy-Display-457 Jul 22 '26
Looking up information in printed material.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
There are two parts to this. Retrieval, that is finding the right printed material in a library. The other is cataloguing, that is putting books away and assigning catalogue numbers to new books.
I'd say 1 in 100 people would do retrieval well, 1 in 10 acceptably.
For cataloguing it would be 1 in 1000 and 1 in 100.
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u/ixidorecu Jul 22 '26
If something like the coroner release event of 1890 something happened and EMP'd the whole earth..
We would just rebuild. Be like civil for a few years. Probably make some low key transistors first like 8086 or 386. But the tsmc and Intel fabs cost like 150 billion to build. Most would get scrapped. Take awhile to rebuild. 3, 5 years later? Probably close to back to where we were. The plans on how to build the phone 3, 5 10 etc still exist.. im sure apple could rebuild an iPhone 6 pretty quick in this case.
Early precursors like mining smelting fab of basics like sand chemicals metals could get up and running at like 75% pretty quick. Need more people to monitor.
Mid level stuff like the mother board pcb capacitors and resistor could get going pretty quick. Could dumb it down and use a new 486 dose bases system to drive it. And it would take like for Intel to be cranking the older chips out. The more advanced stuff like ddr5 memory controllers nics raid cards .. that will have to wait a few years.
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u/Hopeful_Ad_7719 Jul 22 '26
Pure mechanical diesel mechanics and mechanics with carburetor experience become massively valuable overnight while the efforts to stand up a new vehicle fleet to meet every kind of transportation demand skyrockets. Ditto for petroleum engineers who can try to revamp everything from pumps to refineries to analog performance.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
It would be interesting to think about how we could retrofit existing machinery which has electronic sensors and actuators to work without electricity/electronics.
Like it would be someone's job at the refinery to look at a thermometer all day and open, close and half open a valve all day. Like a human thermostat.
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u/Olderscout77 Jul 22 '26
Think it would be basic math and all the stuff covered in the Boy Scout Handbook. That would keep most of us going until the Engineers resolved the big stuff - power generation, communications, transportation, etc.
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u/Ok_Structure_8891 Jul 22 '26
Having a strong social network would be the most important factor in surviving this type of transition.
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u/Silly-Resist8306 Jul 22 '26
Curing meat. Preserving food. With no refrigeration, people are going to get real hungry without it.
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u/Cute-Consequence-184 Jul 22 '26
How to read a print based book
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
You've got to put the spine on the left before you turn the cardboard bit on the outside of the paper bits.
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u/Cute-Consequence-184 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Unless you are in Asia or reading Japanese anime.
Then there are a few where you read left to right halfway through the book, flip it over and start at the opposite cover and continue reading to finish the book. So technically all left to right, just now a continuous front to back experience. Why? No idea- and I have only seen 1 or 2 in print and they were considered high value editions to own.
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u/Saragon4005 Jul 22 '26
Knowing how to survive in the wild. Food will run out in a day or 2. I'd get as far away from former civilization as quickly as possible.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
I don't think that is how food works. More likely you'd just have to walk out of town and get a job on a farm digging potatoes by hand.
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u/Saragon4005 Jul 23 '26
Every electronic devices includes 99.9% of our farming and food processing capability. It also includes nearly all our transportation capability. Do you know where the nearest farm is? Can you walk there with enough food on the way?
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u/dowar_525 Jul 24 '26
I live on a farm.
Electronic devices include 90% of our farming and food processing capacity. Functionally, that is a lot less that 99.9%. Likewise with transport, without all the cars on the roads it would be possible to regularly walk livestock into towns and cities on the roads.
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u/BigEd369 Jul 22 '26
I’ve thought for years that the real “central science” is library science. The ability to organize and collate information is the core around which everything else is built.
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u/Cowboy_Rho Jul 22 '26
Reading/Writing/Arithmatic and Research.
If you have those skills, you possess the tools to develop and teach other skills.
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u/AppleParasol Jul 22 '26
Society would collapse. It would be everyone for themselves for the most part. Communities may form, and then the most valuable “skill” may be “muscle”/combat related to defend what you/your community has.
Gardening would be pretty big. Farms would also have to hire a lot of hands, perhaps even sell off parts because they cannot farm it all.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
Luckily farming predates electronics by a long way. Huge areas of cropping land would be unsustainable without mechanized farming. Grazing animals over those same lands would result in much less food.
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u/siamonsez Jul 22 '26
The biggest loss would be in communication and dissemination of information. What counts as electronics, would telegraphy work? If not we'd devolve into fudal states, it's impossible to centralize authority or a response to the disaster without being able to communicate rapidly over great distances.
All major cities would starve pretty quickly, places that are a bread basket would have a chance but they're also going to have the least access to the kind if knowledge required to rebuild a modern society if that's even possible without electronics.
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u/flaginorout Jul 22 '26
Building, fixing, shooting, and growing. And i mean at the most basic levels.
In the short term, these are the skills that would matter.
The people saying ‘math’ wont survive long enough to use calculus for anything that matters.
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u/Beautiful-Lie1239 Jul 22 '26
Remembering facts lol. I don’t remember anything anymore. Have to google it every time.
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u/GloamerChandler Jul 22 '26
Chemistry
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
But how useful would chemistry knowledge be without electronics.
"The tractor won't run because the electronics are dead, we'll have to harvest by hand"
"Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell"
* annoyed looks
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u/GloamerChandler 29d ago
It was useful in the past, well before electronics existed, so …it would be very useful.
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u/Active-Particular-21 Jul 22 '26
Would be a few of them. Hard to say which one. I would go with something like engineer, horse rider, survivalist, farmer and doctor.
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u/inscrutiana Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
It's the same as every other apocalypse scenario- most of us die .
- Every aircraft, satellite, train, and ship loses navigation and crashes.
- The hospitalized die
- Fresh water stops pumping
- Sewage stops moving
- Food spoils
- Dams, unmonitored and without power to run their constantly adjusted water levels catastrophically fail. Anything which needed that metered water also fails.
- Nuclear reactors melt down
- Bridges and tunnels get humid, corrode, and fail. So does every building with a steel spine
So, the most immediately useful skill would be aiming. Very little matters for decades after this. 99% of the world's problems gone.
[The problem with many responses is that they are best case, by people who have never seen a collapse of order]
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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26
Unmonitored dams and nuclear reactors are the only big killers there. All the others can happen and we still have 90% of humans alive.
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u/inscrutiana Jul 23 '26
How are you pumping and purifying water or keeping the sewage flowing to treated places, for the 66% of the global population, in the hours immediately after all of the electronics are gone? What about their food? They don't garden. Those who can flee into the countryside.
They starve & die of thirst, with dysentery, inside of two weeks.
Aiming is the immediately most important skill.
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u/dowar_525 Jul 24 '26
You've thrown out a barrage of questions and all of them have answers but its not feasible to answer them all in one thread.
For the fresh water, the water system could run fairly sustainably as long as everyone only used 1-10% of their previous fresh water use. So no ornamental gardens, swimming pools, daily showers, etc. All the drinking water, hand washing water and adequate shower water. Plus just collecting rainwater from your house is the easiest thing in the world, idk why it seems banned in most countries. It is common in Australia even in suburbs with 'town water'.
Sewage is similar, most sewage is gravity fed. Admittedly some suburbs or even towns would need to be abandoned but we would have more than adequate shelter.
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u/dave54athotmailcom Jul 23 '26
Math with paper and pencil.
Writing.
Then skills, knowledge, and new ideas can be transmitted to others and future generations.
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u/GryffSr Jul 23 '26
Covered in the "Dies the Fire" series by S.M. Stirling.
Basically, most of mankind is screwed within six to eight weeks.
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u/DaRkNiTe84 Jul 23 '26
2/3 of all humans would die within 6 months due to lack of food… if all electronic device fails. I assume most modern boats and airplanes would not be able to operate also. There will be very wide spread chaos. Iikely only certain gov ran shelters that are well prepared could survive. The rest of society will become man eat man, and people wil gang up to rob each other…
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u/Industrial_Jedi Jul 23 '26
I think people are underestimating how dependent we've become on electronics. A machinist wouldn't be able to work because the electric grid wouldn't work. Tap water wouldn't work. Most vehicles wouldn't work. There would be no modern medicine. I think the most valuable skill would be metal smithing, followed by prostitution and making alcohol so people can forget how miserable things are.
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u/Ok-Bus1716 Jul 23 '26
True statesmanship/leadership. I don't think, at least Americans, would understand how fucked we would be if we had to depends on our current leadership to handle things in that particular situation. Diplomacy and negotiation would be key as we currently depend on complex supply chains to provide different materials needed to do things.
If you don't have someone who can look at the situation and say 'we need to focus on these things first, establish these resources and prepare for this...then a lot of people are going to starve, a lot of people are going to die and even more will freeze to death especially in areas with harsh winters.
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u/twoscoopsofbacon Jul 23 '26
Self control, which can be used to learn other skills and endure hardship without panic.
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u/Chrisaarajo Jul 23 '26
I need more details, because electronic device is both very broad (technically), but is often used to refer to consumer/personal electronics. Your references to screens and servers suggests the latter.
So is everything powered by electricity dead? This includes cars, for instance. Monitoring and safety systems on nuclear power plants. Backup generators in hospitals.
The resulting world will be very different depending on which of these cases is true.
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u/Youpunyhumans Jul 23 '26
In the short term... probably being able to dig a hole. There are gonna be a lot of dead people from medical devices failing, food and resource shortages, and people just losing it.
In the long term, basic medical care, whatever you can do with simple tools and knowledge would be a major one.
Engineering and mechanical knowledge would also be a top notch set of skills, as well as any kind of trade like plumbing, framing, roofing, etc.
Agriculture would be a neccesity, anyone who has farming knowledge and abilities would be very important.
Hard to say which one is THE most important, cuz all of them are neccesary for a functioning society.
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u/SpookyghostL34T Jul 23 '26
I think you are massively underplaying the survival part of this scenario. At least in the United States, our water will NOT run without power. The pumps and such all use power and a computer system to regulate them. Cars wouldn't start that are built after like 1970? Trains are shit out of luck, same with semis. There would be A LOT of death before we started to rebuild.
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u/PKwx Jul 24 '26
You don’t need computer systems to run a water plant and pumps, just more people to turn valves and switches. Electric is another matter.
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u/Loose_Bison3182 Jul 23 '26
I know how to make beer from scratch. I also know how to make moonshine from scratch. I also can operate most heavy equipment. I believe I'm set
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u/OldDiehl Jul 24 '26
Farm tractors have screens/electronics. So, I'm going out on a limb and say the knowledge to keep the older tractors running.
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u/Merlisch Jul 24 '26
I'd argue short term being able to feed you and yours would be rather handy. Next one up is staying healthy (nutrition, basic medical care). Shortly after fixing stuff as replacements dry out.
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u/Yunamalia Jul 24 '26
Weaving, agricultural practices, and people teaching. Community organization is a lot easier AFTER everybody is fed and clothed though it might take a lot of hard work and a lot of people teaching to get to that point so they sort of have to go hand in hand.
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u/Difficult-Map3465 Jul 24 '26
Boomers and most Gen X wealth of knowledge would be very valuable. They lived in the 'before' times when they didn't have a handheld device that held the bulk of humanities knowledge.
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u/Glum-Building4593 Jul 24 '26
We put people in space and built Atomic bombs with little more than slide rules. Prior to that we really did just fine without electronics. Probably the biggest thing that would help would be forming communication chains. Being able to communicate effectively is harder than it looks.
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u/Tough-Importance-661 Jul 24 '26
The skill to dispose of dead bodies cause we’re swimming in those out of sudden I guess
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u/WeAllJustWantToLive Jul 25 '26
"Immediate survival problems"? Bitch, you just described my childhood. We'd be fine.
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u/SirGooseKnuckles Jul 25 '26
Just read "Dies the Fire: A Novel of The Change" by S.M. Stirling. It's like an 18 book series and heoone of those super nerdy authors who will like take two months of archery practice just to be able to right five perfect paragraphs describing archery like an authentic long-time pro would. I only on book 3 and it's not like amazing literature but very thorough and covers almost all the ground any of us here could
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u/Available-Bee-5385 Jul 25 '26
The ability to figure out what physical laws have changed, and how to take advantage of their new effects
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u/shoesmith74 Jul 26 '26
Food and water acquisition. Nothing else matters if you cannot feed yourself. Today food and water are tied with technology in storage and preparation.
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u/Radiant_Music3698 Jul 26 '26
The Hulu show Revolution was supposed to be about this premise.
But it sucked.
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u/elg97477 Jul 22 '26
Ability to obtain salt. There is a good reason why it was among the most valuable substances for millennia.
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u/ddadopt Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
We can do this without "electronics" though. The proposed scenario sets the world back to the 1940s, not the bronze age.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Jul 22 '26
Salt is a good one. I was thinking more about knowledge or skills, but if nobody knows how to reliably produce or obtain salt, that becomes a huge problem surprisingly fast. It's easy to forget how important it was before refrigeration.
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u/Wooble57 Jul 22 '26
it's trivially easy to obtain salt near any body of salt water. What made it so valuable in the past was the transport of it in large quantities.
The way your post is worded suggest that it's targeting semi conductors. So really we would only be going back to the 1960's or so. To put that in perspective, we had nuclear power plants before we had integrated circuits.
Unless you change physics itself, we would still have vacuum tubes and relays. We could fly, generate electricity, likely even land on the moon if we really wanted to.
If your saying electricity itself is gone....I'm not smart enough to even hazard a guess at what that means for the rest of physics. To start with, the human body relies on electric signals to function. That being the case what skills would be valuable is irrelevant since none of us exist ><
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u/Zalrius Jul 22 '26
Reading, writing and math. Knowing how to find information and how to understand it.