The way it’s going…
AI: Happy Birthday! Other notable people who share your birthday: Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Charlie Kirk, and many more great historical figures you should hope to praise!
Sounds like something Grok would say.
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.
How to be human
How to disagree with people politically but remain friends
While this is an understandable sentiment, expressing this today means different things than 10 years ago.
Should we “remain friends” with those that support an administration that deports people to foreign countries without trial? Is it “just politics” when people are ok with a president that is attacking free speech and freedom of the press? With a president deploying the military to cities with Democrat mayors? I don’t think so. We’re talking about freedom and the future of our country. If you support such corruption and destruction of our democracy, we can’t be friends.
most people don’t care about any of that. they are more focused on the local sports team, their schedule at work, their kids sports games and a million other things.
i mean you can grandstand all you want about it… but it won’t ever change those people’s minds. they have other shit to worry about that federal politics, which is largely background noise to them.
your error is thinking other people think about politics like you do. they don’t. they don’t think about it at all.
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.
I still remember my childhood home phone number, but I don’t need to memorise any phone number anymore. I still have them archived for everyone I care to know in a cloud synced joplin file. That also includes birthdays. I can barely remember my own let alone other peoples.
GPS I’d be fucked without. Aphantasia and a horrible sense of direction. I’m glad I missed the paper map era. I only know the routes I have driven multiple times, so a large portion of the core city and satellite towns.
I don’t use Facebook at all. Deleted that shit in 2014.
Don’t use AI very often outside of questions where a traditional web search isn’t or is no longer viable due to enshittification and gameified results. Begrudgingly, and I check the sources. No trusting a sanitized corporate sycophant bot. But it’s not like those traditional web searches weren’t buried in misinfo, disinfo, or AI spam articles either. People seem to willfully not acknowledge that.
Edit: I also read paper books and go to my local library.
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.
Bro, what?
I remember the new emergency number. It’s 01189998819991197253
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
AIpaper remembers everything for us?With phone books we don’t memorise phone numbers, but we still have to read them a dial them and after a few times we don’t need to look them up anymore. With drawn map we still have to look around and make sure we are correct intersection.
They don’t prevent us from remembering stuff, it’s the things that we used to do that helped us to remember and we don’t do anymore.
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.
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.
If your don’t know your own number, how are you going to give it to someone? Of course people have always known their own number. I still remember mine from 50 years ago.
But why do I remember my own number? Because Igive it to people, I write it down in all sort of forms and every time I register somewhere. I actively use the actual number all the time.
I have a work phone that I only use at work, everyone that needs to have that number already have it and I don’t use it for anything else. I have no idea what it is its number since I never had to call to it or give it to anyone.
You don’t know your own number? The amount of times I have had to input it/write it down, it’s good to memorise
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”
Wait, people copied birthdays over each year? We just had one normal yearly calendar and one special birthday calendar that could be used for multiple years. I still use the birthday calendar which has accumulated more names of people I don’t speak to anymore or have died than actual living friends and relatives.
Neat.
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.
Oh. They are incredibly popular and basically anyone who knows the word “mountaineer” brings one.
That said… actually try to watch any of those people use it. They’ll pretend they are but really they are relying on trails or were shown the area by an old. And most of the olds are just relying on knowing a few landmarks and how to use a compass rather than actually figuring out their location based on slope steepness and the like.
The old who taught me how to assist SAR/not need to call SAR always loves to give people a compass and ask them how to actually use one to get their bearings (even when it is just “that is The Nose” let alone “what ravine do you think we might be in on this map?”). Nine times out of ten, it is a debacle as they actively ignore everything but the needle and bezel. And this isn’t just the newbies. Even a lot of the people who have been in the area for 40 years basically only know how to navigate by landmarks and would be up a creek if they had to, let’s say, go overland in the event of an emergency/apocalypse. Once they leave their comfort zone they are as capable of navigating as a proverbial city slicker.
I’ve actually been taught how to take back bearings, triangulation etc, and would still remember how to do that, but there’s definitely some hopeless cases that have no idea how to do that.
Another skill I’ve noticed is missing is the ability to know where you are on a map based on a known point you’ve passed, and the time elapsed since then. People tend to overestimate how far they’ve traveled.
I mean, even that is kind of about treading known ground. Unless it is fairly straight going on very flat terrain, you are going to find your estimates fall apart REAL fast (… unless you are doing a forced military march where people are getting berated/whipped if their strides are too short or not with the rhythm of the cadence). Let alone any winding trails.
Its why, historically, one of the most valuable assets is a local who knows the terrain. Whether that is letting an army know about a really good place for an ambush or just helping to navigate even a bunch of fields in a valley, let alone mountainous terrain.
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.
There were rumours that our two local Street Directories had been made Out-Of-Print. (Melway and UBD)
They are both still active, and a great resource for historians, but their distribution has been seriously curtailed.
We also have a collection of Adventure maps called Rooftops which still have great circulation despite the proliferation of Off-Road mapping apps.
Having offline-paper maps are invaluable when in certain conditions. I have been told that Rooftops are generated by one Cartographer who uses a Pushbike as his exclusive surveying vehicle. (Citation needed)
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.
A GPS is updated. A GPS can be zoomed in on. A GPS won’t get distracted and you miss a turn.
Plus people did drive places without maps, and they’d have to remember directions and be able to orient themselves.
A car compass helps, but yeah, a GPS unit is a lot more convenient.
I don’t doubt they would be able to figure it out, but we must at least acknowledge it’s not plug-and-play. If one doesn’t know their way around, paper maps take some planning. The paper map won’t announce the next upcoming turn in 2 miles. It definitely takes some learning to use.
I was curious to see if someone has ever documented this experience and I was rewarded with this video: https://youtu.be/sr9hQ_tDLP0
A gps is a paper map on the computer with the feature that shows your location on the map.
a gps is an planet covering realtime map pinpointing your location and destination, things a traditional map DOES NOT DO.
fuck mate a map only gives you orientation, you still have to know where north is for it to be any use.
There’s nothing to learn. The gps voice prompt takes the place of the passenger who’s job it was to voice prompt you.
a navigator… SAY THEIR FUCKING NAME, THEY WERE NAVIGATORS, IT WAS AN ENTIRE CAREER LOL
can’t tell if this is all satire and I’m overreacting but holy shit I’d love to see this generation do some orienteering.
You looked at a map beforehand and saw what directions to go. The map book has an index in the back to find destinations.
You often wrote a note for yourself beforehand. Rt 40, take exit 17a, take 97 S exit, Rt onto Brookshire,
You didn’t need to know north.
I drove for decades before gps. No one taught me how to use a map. You bought one and it was obvious because it was the same as any text book with an index in the back.
You act like kids are stupid.
Honestly, I suspect a lot of that kind of mentality is just projecting by people who struggled with something and assume everyone will struggle as well. Or people who just have a need to feel superior to other people by trying to gatekeep something by pretending it’s super difficult to learn/do.
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.
I mean, if no one has a cell phone almost everyone in your daily life only required 4 digits to remember. The first 6 numbers was the same for the whole town.
“Area codes” were a big deal, even Ludacris made a song about being so famous, he knew women from multiple geographic locations.
Maps were there in case of emergencies, nowadays people gps to the same office they’ve been driving to for a decade. But that’s more about random traffic conditions.
For me, almost all the numbers were in my head (except for work numbers) as were birthdays. Now I can only remember two numbers and the absolute most important bdays (which is easier because they don’t change). My sense of direction remains abysmal.
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
The Rolodex was only for less common phone numbers and most people had 10+ phone numbers memorized
You sure?
I remember my folks having written down the 10 most important numbers on a piece of cardboard on the phone.And if you were out and about and needed to call someone for help would you have been able to call multiple people from a pay phone?
Tough luck. Hope you remembet your top 3 important numbers.
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.
Do you still have a bunch of friends phone numbers from the last few years memorized? Do you have your local delivery place’s number memorized?
When you go on a road trip you still look at a map, route directions yourself, and develop a loose memory of it?
You can say off the top of your head which friends birthdays are on which days for the next 3 months?
It’s not an opinion that modern technology makes us not have to memorize information that’s just objective fact the debate is about whether relying on technology causes brain damage and that’s where research is still being done.
In the past 20 years really the only “new” thing we have to memorize are passwords which we still had before but they are at least more complicated now but even then many people repeat the same few passwords or use a password manager so they aren’t remembering 10 unique passwords
Using technology to remember things for us is literally one of the fundamental purposes of technology going back to the invention of the written word, manufacturable paper, printing press, computers, and now phones so I genuinely don’t see how you can say that since 1985 you don’t think people rely on technology for memory any more
Begging the question on all of these.
I never knew the number for my local pizza place, because I had a Rolodex and a phone book. If I needed to make a call I opened one of those two things. My modern phone contact book is just a better version of the same thing.
I use a gps to navigate routinely, because it gives me real time traffic alerts; after driving to any place a couple of times I can generally get there on my own, regardless of if I used GPS or a paper map to get there the first time.
I have never been able to remember birthdays. That’s why I have always, since I was a kid, had a calendar.
It is, in fact, definitely an opinion that we no longer need to remember anything because “tech”. Facts tend to be far less flexible.
If you didn’t have a bunch of those common phone numbers memorized then that is definitely a you thing. My whole friend group all knew each others phone numbers and it was actually important that you could memorize those phone numbers in case you had to call from someone elses house or a pay phone.
You even acknowledge that you use a gps for routine travel and think that is the same as developing a mental map?
Again literally the act of looking at a calendar to see future dates is more mentally demanding then relying on getting a reminder sent to you
Did you even read what I wrote? Do you have your entire oral history memorized? No because we have the ability to write it down that’s technology. Do you use password manager to autofill passwords? Do you get text message/app/email reminders of appointments? Do you neglect to memorize things because you can google them? You already said that you use gps for routine travel around town.
All of that involves using memory less, we don’t have enough tech to fully replace memory and probably never will. If you don’t believe me go 24 hours without using technology from the past 40 years for anything not explicitly required for work so no gps, no phone reminders, no google, no password managers then try and do normal things like go run a bunch of errands, cook a meal, pay bills, go shopping in person instead of online
Los Angeles Thomas Guide anyone?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Plato’s the one you don’t wanna argue with. Dude was an ex-wrestler.
Friedrich Nietzsche hurts my brain.
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.
My old landline was 0712124437.
And that was almost 20 years ago.
Meanwhile I struggle to remember my current one ;Ddeleted by creator
