We don’t memorize phone numbers anymore, we rely on GPS to tell us where to go and Facebook reminds us of birthdays. What else will we stop remembering once AI 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.
My father was a pro at driving without gps. Now he can't go 2 blocks without assistance from it
As someone who is very good at driving without GPS in my local area, using GPS for long trips outside my local area does for sure slow my ability to learn the new location. But it doesn't remove what you already know.
So if your father is becoming incapable of driving his old haunts without assistance, I would worry there's something more serious lurking in the background beyond tech makes you dumb.
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?
Youth spends all their working. Day reading this goddamn books instead of doing something productive like tilling the fields!
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.
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 :)
Plato's the one you don't wanna argue with. Dude was an ex-wrestler.
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.
“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.
Please tell me you see the irony of this comment.
I memorize important numbers
I don't use GPS after the first time going to a place and remember my routes
Facebook? what... ? people actually use that?
I won't use AI..my information stays with me, in my mind when I need it. I can't rely on others, I won't rely on computers to be there when I need it and that most certainly applies to ai
You are old school. As am I
I'm exactly like that, and 20 y/o. Though my body feels like 80.
I'm probably older than both of you. I use gps constantly even when I know the route. It's safer to focus on the road than think about the route.
People didn't use to memorize numbers. They used little private address books that you wrote your numbers in. Moving that text to a computer screen changed nothing for the majority of people.
I don't use Facebook but I didn't use Myspace either.
I don't use AI but I have nothing against it. I used it once to write some code in VBscript which is a language that would be a complete waste of time to learn. It saved dozens of hours.
I remember the routes, too, but you don’t have random road congestion or construction that sometimes necessitates alternative routes? It’s like having a psychic friend that tells you when the most direct route is fucked.
I remember a few people's phone numbers in case I need to ring them on someone else's phone.
Calendars existed before computers.
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.
Side note: people don't talk like they used to. It's not writing that did this, it's the online forums. As people immersed more and more in online only communications, I've seen their morals and self regulation fail. People talk similar to how they comment online: trash without a filter
Bro, what?
Pretty obvious what they’re saying - this same fear mongering happens every time something new comes along, and it’s always wrong.
LLMc can't remember anything. It's all an illusion based on systems that have existed for decades.
Why we should kill each other
yeah, instead it will tell us why we should kill each other while the wealthy..... wait a second....
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 remember the new emergency number. It's 01189998819991197253
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.
Well reasoned. Reading to get an overview and summarise is already a skill going away in the new breed of researchers.
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.
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 ;D
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.
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.
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
The faces of our fathers.
Been a bit guess it's time for that series again.
The Dark Tower by Stephen King for those that aren't familiar with it. It's a lot more 'weird' than say what you'd expect from his horror novels. I think it's probably closer to the old strange stories from magazines way back in the day. I think that's a major reason I like it. Oh not to spoil much (it's like 7 books this comes out in the 2nd or so so by page count the intro) Evidently I f'ed up the tags so didn't work as a spoiler I'll add spaces just in case.
::: small spoiler here
It's a multiverse story which is way better than you may think, if you like that thing, I do and wish I realized a decade or two sooner
:::
I loved it as a kid but could never finish it as an adult.
Yes, that was the intent.
Your spoiler tag is broken. Spoilers don't bother me, but you're obviously trying to be thoughtful to others, so I thought I'd let you know. It should be formatted like this:
::: spoiler spoiler
The text that spoils things.
:::
So it looks like this:
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
I called the only number I had memorized, and Hooked on Phonics hung up on me.
I remember like 8 numbers, I only use one, my original home phone.
I memorized my friend's phone number. It's because she's a lawyer, and that seems like a good number to have memorized.
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!
Good idea to recognize, but bad examples.
The issue isn't even using devices to replace cognitive functions. That's anprim shit, I'm not gonna do 5 digit numbers on my head, imma use a calculator, especially if it's something important or there are stakes to getting it wrong.
The issue more than anything is agency.
Thank you for this. Now I'm going to be thinking of this now :)
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.
How to be human
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 have my wifes number memorized also my sister and parents.
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.
This is /possibly/ part of a long term trend of decreasing human reliance on brainpower.
Brain size doesn't neatly correlate to intelligence, but it's still kind of used as a proxy, over human evolution. It gets bigger for a long time, then starts getting smaller again, starting maybe 20k-3k years ago.
This has been attributed to group size, agriculture, writing or statistical error. So maybe it's not a thing.
stupefied
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.
I still memorize phone numbers and directions.
In fact, I’ve increased the amount of things I memorize. In addition to the massive amount of usernames and passwords I have to keep in mind, I have credit card and bank routing and account numbers memorized so I can enter payment information on the fly.
Some people know telephone numbers, some of us don't. 🤷♂️ What's the big deal, the point is, you should have an alternate method to access your contacts...
Like memorization
As a counterpoint, I used to memorize everything and not write anything down. Then I got a serious head injury (got hit by a SUV going 55mph) and wound up with short-term memory problems. Now I have to learn how to take better notes, which is so hard to do with memory problems.
Except for those that are closest to us, we never would have remembered any of those things anyway; all of it would have been written down in an address book. Now the address book is digital, and is part of an LLM for some reason (selling your data).
If smart glasses with heads-up displays become normalized, you will eventually have married couples that don't remember each other's names.
It takes me a few beers to get it right...
Having to remember a bunch of telephone numbers really sucked. I was particularly bad at it, myself, and had to carry around a little address book. I’m so much more happy now that I can store phone numbers in my phone.
Music algorithms.
Finding music and appreciating it more because you had to physically search for it at a store and you only had so much money, so you listened to that album over and over. Talking with friends to hear the music they thought was cool and would recommend something to you according to your taste.
Now we have infinite choices and even when we find something new to us, a lot of times quickly becomes forgotten for other music we just found.
nah hammer to fall still slaps
I will never forget about Dre
how for right coherent sentences other people red.
also the ability to research things, a lot of people talk about how good it is at that… and it is, for a quick and dirty intro, but it’s always outdated, incomplete, and inaccurate.
it’s basically only good as a springboard to do real, Natural Intelligence, research…
also I hearby copyright ©️ and trademark ™️ “Natural Intelligence” and “NI”
how for right coherent sentences other people red
I can't tell if this is a bit or not—I thought I was having a stroke for a minute.
Man, I didn't even memorize numbers other than my own house's when cell phones were something only rich businessmen had. I used a phone book.
How to hard boil eggs.
The internet makes us dumb. Why bother remembering anything when you can just look it up?
Counterpoint: The internet makes us smart because we can learn how to do anything we need to do when we need to do it. We still need experts for a lot of things, but simple home repairs? Plant care? How to properly separate a wash? et cetera. In fact I'd argue the things that we do regularly we do remember because we do them regularly. Just like we used to memorize phone numbers because calling them was something we did regularly we have different things we can do regularly now and get adept at instead of remembering numbers. The access to information has cut out the middle-man so to speak. I spent half my life not knowing how to properly separate laundry, or how to cook certain meals, because I didn't have anyone available to teach me. I was able to self-teach through the internet. Why is looking it up so bad if you grew up with dipshit parents who didn't know how to do anything or teach you anything before the internet was around? Hell, the internet has even taught me what the right tools are for the job I'm trying to do which is a huge aspect of any type of DIY.
I've honestly been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not proud of myself.
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.
Bus numbers and it's connections. Growing up in a metropolitan Asian city, I enjoyed taking buses everywhere. To school, to grandparents place, to friend's houses, to friend's grandparents houses etc, I could give routes that went through posh neighbourhoods, or food recommendations along the routes.
It was my super power before Google maps came along 🥲
The truth
When the jetsons tech finally kicks in and humans stop flossing both their ends X_X
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.
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.
You sure?
I remember my folks having written down the 10 most important numbers on a piece of cardboard on the phone.
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.
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.
Los Angeles Thomas Guide anyone?