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”
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.
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
If memory is so important to you than you really need to stop reading and writing. Before literacy was common everyone remembered everything. Knowledge was oral. People had fantastic memories because they had to.
“Report says that in the schools of the Druids they learn by heart a great number of verses, and therefore some persons remain twenty years under training. And they do not think it proper to commit these utterances to writing, although in almost all other matters, and in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters. I believe that they have adopted the practice for two reasons — that they do not wish the rule to become common property, nor those who learn the rule to rely on writing and so neglect the cultivation of the memory; and, in fact, it does usually happen that the assistance of writing tends to relax the diligence of the student and the action of the memory.”
- Julius Caesar, Garlic War book 6.
Now my mind is filled with knowledge of current ly useful processes instead of facts that aren’t immediately useful. I know details of cooking, 3D printing, programming and home repair. Your brain is finite. It’s why your memories are deleted when you sleep.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/sleeps-crucial-role-in-preserving-memory/
Are you deliberately misunderstanding what I am saying just to argue?
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?
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche hurts my brain.
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.
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.
It’s because of the burden of knowledge you’re carrying in your head. The choices you make…
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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.
Ha I learned VBBasic back in the day self taught. I wrote thousands of lines of code. Then I learnt about loops :)
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.
sure, but east is still easy. I don’t mind heavy traffic, or needing detours. I’m patient and hardly even in a rush. if I’m late for something, meh…
In my community, it seems the local, state, federal government and local utilities are all competing to shut down as much of roads as possible, so there’s always a bunch of weird diversions to traffic. An unfortunate side-effect of underinvestment in infrastructure until the need is absolutely dire.
Because the crews don’t get much work done in the winter, they tend to concentrate all their work on warmer months, which exacerbates the issue.
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?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.
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
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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.
“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 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.
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
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
Why we should kill each other
yeah, instead it will tell us why we should kill each other while the wealthy… wait a second…
I know about 4 phone numbers by memory:
- My childhood home phone
- My childhood best friend’s home phone
- My cell phone
- My ex-wife’s cell phone
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 remember like 8 numbers, I only use one, my original home phone.
I called the only number I had memorized, and Hooked on Phonics hung up on me.
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 :)
