Yeah it’s way worse than when we used a Rolodex to remember phone numbers, kept a map book in the dash, and took 20 minutes to transfer birthdays from last years calendar to this years.
I am about as anti-AI as one can get, but this is a bit silly.
it reminds me of this:
Every newspaper there is also chock full of ads.
Don’t know why people think it’s a new thing. They were pretty intrusive for the time as well.
“Continued on page 9” is code for “people paid a lot of money for the ads on page 8”
No don't you dare stop the circlejerk! /s
But seriously phone numbers were broken into chunks of three to four digits to even make them something we could remember. Is it so terrible my brain has more space to remember other things instead of strings of numbers?
There are valid arguments for knowing how to use a paper map. We’re fortunate that GPS was opened up to the world, and we’ve flourished for it, but one very bad solar storm and it’s possible we’ll be back to paper for regional and farther navigation.
And the vast majority of people will have no problem using a road Atlas... Once they find out it exists. It won't be the optimal route but getting from one cross street to another is very intuitive if you ever looked at the screen in Google maps.
Navigating a countryside or understanding topological maps is a lost cause but even back in the 80s like two weirdos knew how to do that.
Topo maps are still very popular in the outdoors communities even today.
Outdoors? Where is that?
Apparently, it’s where the grass is. Or so I’m told.
Well shit. If that's where I can score some grass, I'm in! Or, out? I don't know anymore.
A gps is a paper map on the computer with the feature that shows your location on the map.
There's nothing to learn. The gps voice prompt takes the place of the passenger who's job it was to voice prompt you.
They were also semi structured. All my school-friends started with the same first area code and first chunk. I just had to know where they lived and remember the last 4 digits.
Mobile Phone numbers were randomly generated, and unless a social group deliberately got sequential numbers because we all got our phones at the same time, there would be no way to associate numbers.
The Rolodex was only for less common phone numbers and most people had 10+ phone numbers memorized
You can use the map as a reference but people didn’t use it for drives around town as it is much harder to constantly being referencing a map compared to a gps. Even when people did use Mapquest they would do things like read 2.8 miles make a right on X St and then make a left in 0.2 miles on Y st and look at their odometer and hold the thought in their head that they are looking for X st
And while people did put birthdays on a calendar it meant that they had a paper calendar that they were regularly checking to see what is happening in the future instead of relying on constantly being told that something is happening which while that may sound trivial is a huge distinction in terms of mental processing.
Memory is a very important thing and as time has progressed we have added more and more crutches which help prevent people from forgetting, help the differently abled, and expand our capacity by orders of magnitude but that comes at the expense of a lack of using one’s memory and critical thinking.
What the long term consequences of that are is still up in the air. some preliminary studies have shown “brain rot” but they have had pretty terrible methods and nothing that I would treat as any sort of fact. I however don’t personally see a scenario where it’s positive in anyway and countless studies with the elderly have shown that having a less active mind leads to mental degradation
I feel like you’re really grasping at wanting this to be true, but I gotta tell you I lived through all of these things being common and none of what you’re asserting matches my reality.
The number of things that I have to actually remember hasn’t really changed in the last 40 years.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1446354
The invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
Socrates
This is one thing I tell people about math. Like, yes, we have amazing calculators in our pockets everywhere we go, and in the real world we will likely never need to do more complex math than, like, seventh grade algebra, and even that would be a rarity.
But that brain-crushing, painful learning of the process of math and how to compute is like power-lifting for your brain.
If you can power through that and train your brain to learn something as abstrusely taught as modern mathematics, then that will make all of the other learning things that you have to do in your life 100 times easier.
As someone with a math degree it frustrates me that people always say "but when will I use this in the real world?" Whether or not you need that math in the real world the real value in learning math is learning how to approach problems in an organized, specific, and detail oriented process. The process of learning formal logic and following through to the end is a very important skill for people to have. Instead, it's all about "how do I get to the answer?" There's a reason why 75% of your score in higher level math is your work and not your answer. The work is what matters
Another important thing is knowing when to use maths. I've been doing some statistical analysis for a personal project lately and it struck me that without those tedious lessons I'd have no idea this was even possible, never mind how to do it.
I'm not gonna argue with Socrates :)
Meh, you probably should.
Most of his students that we know of were vicious oligarchs who abolished democracy in Athens until they killed so many people that there was an uprising against them.
If he was around today, there's a good chance he'd be part of the trump regime.
With phone books, we don't memorize phone numbers any more, we rely on drawn maps to tell us where to go and calendars reminds us of birthdays. What else will we stop remembering once ~~AI~~ paper remembers everything for us?
Like, people used rely Rolodex's and calendars to remember phone numbers and birthdays, respectively. In other words, we used to write things down. When I left Facebook, I did literally go through their calendar and write down all my friends birthdays.
Navigation is a skill you have to learn. When I was an EMT, my FTO drilled the basics in to me. I can find my way to a city Ive never been, but I still use a GPS to find a specific place off the major cross streets. People used to give more advice with the destination, now they just say, "oh, come to this XXXX address place" because they assume youll be using a GPS, and the skill to describe "its off of this road" is both becoming lost, and a generational disconnect.
With the movie, people will forget how to read.
With the printing press, people will forget how to write.
With the book, people will forget how to remember.
With writing, people will forget how to talk.
“AI” as in the common LLMs that most people think of doesn’t remember anything new for us and doesn’t invent anything new.
The best it can offer is a mathematical chance to make an inference that we might not have already, based on whatever it was trained on. It’s a dice roll on insight, and the house always wins.
Who still uses Facebook?
People keeping up with organizations, family and friends who refuse to use stuff like Signal.
The trick is not to follow assholes, switch off news and patch it with Revanced.
I memorize the phone numbers of my family, but why would anyone memorize the phone numbers of the rest of their contacts? Nobody did that before we got address books in our phones. That's literally why phone books existed.
So, I'm going to start this on two things I've seen degrade in people who grew up with computers as a primary source of information versus a secondary source.
First, I've seen the ability to look through a document degrade over time as younger people have gotten used to Ctrl+F. The ability to manually look up and scan through a document has degraded. Also, I've seen people will then hyperfocus on the paragraph at the detriment of skimming the page.
Second, the ability to read not perfectly legible text has degraded as well. If the document is a poor scan or bad print handwriting, younger people have to practice the skill of reading it which was usually assumed to be had.
So, where do I think this will go in the future with AI?
First, I'm seeing AI used a lot to summarize and those results are being trusted. I see a future where younger people won't have that ability to process and summarize data because they will be out of practice.
Second, I see the ability to write is going to degrade since people will be out of practice as people rely on AI to write for themselves. That lack of practice is going to have major impacts to critical thinking skills.
Who's we?
I still remember the fucking IP address of the main local (member of a three way cluster) data server for a bank that folded over 15 years ago.
2102231063 (used to be area code 512) was the back/kitchen phone of the firehouse my dad worked at. He retired in '93 and died in 2011.
And I almost never need directions to a place I've been once.
I don't forget faces but fuck do I forget names even when I repeat them or use other memory techniques.
I might be neurologically a little divergent, but I don't know, and make no assumptions.
We didn't stop remembering phone numbers because our phones remembers them for us, we stopped remembering numbers because we stopped dialing them, back then there was this joke about not knowing your own number, why should I know my own number? I never call myself, and when I do I always get a busy signal.
We don't even get to see the numbers, we have to make an extra effort to memorise numbers when we used to just know them after dialing them every day.
With GPS is something similar, we have trouble remembering how to get from point A to point B because GPS substituted landmarks. We turn right when the GPS says so, so we stopped looking for the gas station, the bus stop or the road sign. Again, we need to make an extra effort to pay attention to our surroundings to know when to turn right next time we come without a GPS when before that was just how you learned to get to places.
At least for me this is very obvious in video games, every time I deactivate the minimap I don't know how to get anywhere and I start to notice how rich some of the environments are when I stop having one eye fixed in the corner following the yellow line.
So with AI I don't know, probably won't be what it does for us but what we stop doing because of that.
I never memorized those. We had a of the most common phone numbers on the wall next to the phone. Birthdays I didn't need to remember either because the date was in the invitation card.
Navigation is something I'm way worse than my dad for example, I'll give you that. I'll rely on GPS even when I know how to get to my destination because I always tend to drive the same routes and sometimes there is a much shorter one that I didn't even think of.
I know about 4 phone numbers by memory:
Two of those numbers no longer work, so if I ever go to jail there is only one person I can call. 😬
I know the IT Crowd emergency services phone number because it had a jingle.
0118 999 88199 9119 725....... 3
Why we should kill each other
LLMc can't remember anything. It's all an illusion based on systems that have existed for decades.
Spell check is one of those.
Writing our own letters. That was actually a skill
Stored phone numbers and GPS sre reliable though. I never remembered most numbers or birthdays anyway due to ADHD, so those being easily accessible was a benefit.
GPS directions also include construction and more accurate time estimates. I never learned alternate routes because remembering the ones I knew was enough effort and I still learn those. Going to new cities is way easier now!
I memorized my friend's phone number. It's because she's a lawyer, and that seems like a good number to have memorized.
I remember a few people's phone numbers in case I need to ring them on someone else's phone.
Calendars existed before computers.
That’s entirely up to you. Do you not have phone numbers for your main people memorized? I also have my library card memorized. This level of memory work isn’t rocket scientist level functioning, it’s a choice.
Do you really want to be in a hospital, after a car accident, with no phone (destroyed/lost in crash), and have no idea how to call your parent, spouse, or child? This occurs more often than you’d think.
I continue to remember phone numbers and birthdays. No Google or Facebook for me and I'm waiting for the AI bubble to pop.
Edit: GPS, I thought you meant Google play services. I do use an offline map on my phone if I'm going to an unfamiliar area but I have no problem reading a map.
Okay, but its also much rarer to get lost and stranded with no way to get help anymore. You really have to go out of your way to be completely isolated.
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