And the problem seems to be getting worse. Roughly four in every five adults in the UK struggle with mathematical literacy. The mean numeracy proficiency scores of 16-65 year-olds in the US is significantly below average. (Worried about number crunching? Test your own numeracy with this adaptive diagnostic).

So, why should we care?

While mathematical illiteracy makes life hard for individuals, its consequences are truly global: research suggests a correlation between poor numeracy skills and national unemployment, productivity, even physical health. For a post-Brexit Britain, a decline in numeracy could mean an economy that’s less internationally competitive. But does it really matter if we cannot think quantitatively when we have phones and other devices that can do it for us?

Stuart Elliot, a visiting scholar at the National Academy of Sciences in the US works on comparing humans and computers in an effort to understand which skills might one day be overtaken by machine – and therefore become obsolete. “I think we are close to the moment when machines will help not just with arithmetic calculations but with numerical reasoning,” he says.

In the same way calculators replaced the need for long division by hand, computers might someday remove the need for qualitative reasoning.

But before we abandon maths to the sentient machines, let’s consider the risks of doing that. The Internet of Things (a system of internet connected objects which can exchange information and data) is generating an ever-growing pool of our personal data: phones, fitness trackers, smart home devices, browsing history, travel cards and electronic medical records all spew out vast amounts of information about us – big data that can be collected and exploited.



