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.

“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.

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.

I remember a few people’s phone numbers in case I need to ring them on someone else’s phone.

Calendars existed before computers.

Who still uses Facebook?

LLMc can’t remember anything. It’s all an illusion based on systems that have existed for decades.

I remember the new emergency number. It’s 01189998819991197253

Why we should kill each other

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 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.

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.

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.