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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

> You don’t need an artificially intelligent robot to tell you about the weather every day. Just look outside or watch the local news or even look at your phone.

I stopped reading here. This is FUD, or scaremongering, or something.

The truth is the reason the Echo family (and others) have seen such success is because they approach the virtual assistant problem from, in my opinion a novel and underutilized, place: the home appliance.

Sure I can pull out my phone (or is it charging on the nightstand?) to check the weather, but I can ask my Echo while I'm tying my shoes and by the time I'm done grab a jacket if necessary. It's so natural.

I have bought Echo dots as gifts for family and friends -- there seems to be a 50/50 split between the primary use being for music or home automation. It's far less kludgier than using a phone to turn your lights on and off. What if you have guests?

Lastly, when I travel I find myself missing the utility of being able to simply ask a question in the middle of another task, hands free. I've heard that some hotels are installing Echos, I think that's great.

Overall I think they're a great value add to my life -- I could buy a new phone for almost a thousand bucks and I barely get any noticeable improvement (and the improvements are usually along the lines of things actually working the way they are supposed to).

For $30, an Echo is a steal.

View on HN

> It's far less kludgier than using a phone to turn your lights on and off.

Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch? This kind of nonsense puts me in mind of "Wall-E". Fat, inert humans being hauled around on hovercrafts, their every need tended to by a watchful panoply of machines. If someone in my family gives me an Echo/Alexa/whatever, it's going in the trash.

Agreed, but mostly imo because the light switch works fine as it is. I believe smart lights solve a problem that doesn't really exist. Of course this stuff could be really helpful for people with disabilities, however.

Home automation is a life changer for the disabled, frail, and the chronically ill. For that reason alone they are worthy of development. If lazy people are the driver and primary market for these technologies, so be it, as far as I am concerned.

This. I'm quadriplegic and the Amazon Echo has revolutionised my life for the better, I made a big full comment on the other thread on this topic on the front page right now so I won't repeat myself. But I'm a pretty good reason for these devices to exist.

Obviously they need more privacy controls, but so far they have been a unalloyed good for me.

>Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch?

Because it is more efficient to yell at Alexa "Turn off the bathroom lights" than stand up, walk to the bathroom and turn them off.

Or better yet, having all your lights and things turning on as you walk in the door. Or having Alexa wake you up by turning on your lights slowly.

Or baking something and telling Alexa to set a timer. No more having to type into Google "20 minute timer" then remembering to keep that tab open and your sound on.

> than stand up, walk to the bathroom and turn them off.

> No more having to type into Google "20 minute timer" then remembering to keep that tab open and your sound on.

The horror

If you're baking or cooking, your hands are often covered with things you don't want to smear all over your phone, and saying "Alexa, how many tablespoons are in a quarter of a cup?" starts to seem pretty practical.

Erm... I have a cooking timer. It's spring-operated, you turn it left to the max and then turn right to set the time. I specifically bought it so I don't need a battery in the kitchen, because I have a battery timer, too (I still use it sometimes, because of how loud it is).

You don't really need a whole unwieldy computer to just call you after 20 minutes.

No one is saying that you need an amazon echo to do anything - obviously you could just use a physical timer, or pull out a calculator or a book to do conversions. The point is the echo makes it more convenient.

I have my hue lights synced so when my echo timer goes off, my living room lights flash. No more missing a timer because I was distracted in another room and didn't hear it.

Still requires physical contact and cleaning if your hands are dirty from cooking.

How well does that work when you're working on three different things in the kitchen, and they each need timing?

Yes, a mechanical egg timer is still a timer, and still functional. But so were sand timers. A mechanical clock still works, but many people still use digital clocks now a days.

I like the hands-free nature of the Echo timers, so I can set a timer while I still have dough or raw meat on my hands. And like I said, I can have an oven timer going while I have a timer for my pasta on the stove, and any variety of things I care to time (my kid's 5 minute timeout for fighting with his brother, for example).

Maybe you should have just turned off the light on your way out of the bathroom.

Gee, thanks captain hindsight!

Bunch of we-don't-like-options luddites in here. I'm surprised people aren't modding their cars with a hand crank b/c

> why can't you just get the crank, walk up front, and start it manually, instead of turning a key like a princess.

Yelling at my home is on my top 10 favorite things about this century so far. I tried for decades to utilize the force to get the lights on/off or grab the tv remote. Burst a blood vessel in my eye trying one night. Never worked.

No more having to glance at the clock on the wall (or the stove, or the microwave, or whatever) and mentally noting "in 20 minutes, it will be half-past".

And then forgetting because that tricky synchronisatiin problem from work pops into your head and you wander off...

Walking across a cramped room in the pitch dark can be dangerous, particularly if you're living in a dinky apartment and have osteoporosis. Consider also that a lot of people use wheelchairs to get around.

Long story short, there are many lives very different from yours. There are ways beyond Wall-E (that are also far more useful and connected with reality) to broaden one's horizons.

The Clapper was a big hit for a reason.

And the Echo is a big hit for a reason

That's what I do, even though I have remote control switches. The nice thing for me is when you're leaving the house and you can just turn off all the lights. Or you're laying down in bed and you can shutdown the whole house (turn off lights, lock doors, etc).

Yeah but you can say that about any modern convenience. Why don't you just.. you know wash your clothes by hand? Or are you fat and inert too?

there is zero privacy concern regarding the average washing machine, not to mention the fact that a washing machine is actually saving you hours of time per week, whereas if you add up every single convenience offered by a home assistant compared to, say, the same exact thing you have on your phone, you're saving seconds in exchange for the normalization of always-listening microphones in your home.

>Yeah but you can say that about any modern convenience.

If only we've had enough intelligence discover sensible limits to things, instead of doing everything just because we can.

The idea that the limit would happen to be just beyond where it was earlier in our lives reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote:

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

"2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

"3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

>The idea that the limit would happen to be just beyond where it was earlier in our lives reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote:

If it's a technological limit, it will always be "just beyond where it was earlier in our lives", so that's a tautology.

One discovers such limits as you get to them -- you only get to be able to say "too much" after the ability you think is too-much has been invented. Heck, perhaps dead guys from centuries ago would have thought of it too much if we've described it to them, we just can't now.

For other limits, that don't arise as some technology just becomes available, what's too much is not necessarily "just beyond where it was earlier in our lives".

E.g. it took us 60+ years of merrily driving away before the LA smog became intolerable back in the 70s/80s. Pollution of the 50s levels was already beginning to be "too much" but we didn't know it yet. But even someone in the 80s would have easily agreed to that -- that a previous era had the optimum, and not just what they were used to.

Some of my lights aren't controlled by a switch on the wall but on the neck of the lamp or a cable behind a table. So I have the option of opening an app. using a wireless remote. or simply uttering a sentence...or breaking my back to switch them all on. Including being able to easily control the overall lighting scheme of my living room.

People leveled the exact same complaint against the TV remote. And yet, here we are.

In an epidemic of obesity

post hoc ergo propter hoc

Ah that damned remote

Yep. I have a friend whose house is almost exclusively using Hue bulbs and Google Home for voice control of them, and it's the worst experience I could ever imagine having in my house. Instead of a quick switch flick you have to say the command and pray that the device understood you correctly. It's borderline idiotic - we walked into a room and he had to repeat himself THREE times before google home understood and turned on the lights. He laughed about it and said "usually it works better". I don't give a damn. A switch has the exact same utility and works 100% of the time, always.

To be fair to the Hue bulbs, we've got a bunch of them in the office since we have stand-up lamps. There's a physical switch controlling the Hue bulbs on the wall next to the door and it's way easier to get all the lights switched off if you're the last one leaving for the night with that one switch. But then, we've just embraced the common switch rather than replacing them all with voice commands.

Time lost to light switches in a year is measured in, what, 10s of minutes and maybe $20 in wasted electricity and bulb-life a year? If you have a pretty big house and are kinda bad at turning off the lights when you should?

Even a perfect solution that never screwed up and wasted my time would have to also be very cheap ($100-200 for whole house—yeah, right) and take no time to install/maintain for that to be worth it to me.

Whenever someone says voice control I think of the two Scots in an elevator skit from "Burnistoun" S1E1. It's a BBC Scotland show, but may be available through your favorite streaming services.

When I want to remotely control a light switch with my voice, I tell a kid to get up and flip it. It doesn't always work, but I at least know that they understand what I want. And it means that sometimes you have to be the one to flip the switch for someone else.

It is funny, but does a disservice to the major improvements in voice recognition. The one thing that most people don't complain about is the voice recognition of Alexa, Ok Google, Siri or Cortana.

Parent anecdote:

We have fireTV which offers push button voice commands, my 2yo -- who is a little retarded in his speech -- launched Plex the other day (I said "launch" he said "Plex"). I was, inter alia, impressed it managed to decipher his speech, albeit a single word.

Very interesting, makes me wonder how young the voices included in the test sets were. Clearly it's not quite perfect yet though [0] :)

[0]: http://www.craveonline.com/design/1189025-amazon-alexa-doesn...

Sounds like he was just trying to show off his new gadgets? I've got Hue bulbs in every room, but if it's easier to flip a switch, I'll flip a switch (Hue bulbs still turn off/on with the regular wall switch...). What I think is useful is saying "turn off all the lights" when I'm about to go to bed, or if I'm out and about and want to make sure my lights are off.

The main reason I bought them was the ability to display multiple colors - I absolutely wear that out. I love having a red-colored room when I'm playing video games. Dimmed 'sunset' colors when watching a movie. Party colors when friends are over.

I think they're really fun, sometimes useful.

> Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch?

Fine if you have a standard home with one switch and one light on the ceiling.

I live in a loft style appartment and have about six lamps in the main area. I would much rather tell an app "set dining table light to dim" than walk around the room across the two floors to turn lamps on and off.

Much better, you can tell the app "set a sexy mood" and have all half my lamps turn off, dim some of them and put the few color hue bulbs to pink. All of this with one word.

Right now, I do all of that with my phone. Problem is that when I am at home my phone is often on the kitchen table or charging next to the bed. I have to go and pick it up to interact with my smart(ish) home.

Investing in a vocal interface such as the Echo or Google thingy sounds very interesting to me. If buying all those smart lights didn't kill my budget, I would have one already.

> Much better, you can tell the app "set a sexy mood" and have all half my lamps turn off

Then you wonder why Barry White recommendations start appearing in Amazon

Telling a machine to turn off the downstairs lights is easier than walking downstairs, turning off everything manually, walking back upstairs.

It's a good exercise, your body will thank you.

That's a bad excuse.

Some of us already get at least an hour daily exercise and it's debatable whether you need more when combined with a healthy diet. Modern conveniences and automation are not about being lazy but efficient and productive. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised so many here seem against these things as I often see people here spend a vast amount of time over-engineering and over-thinking automation and productivity tools/solutions/hacks otherwise, even celebrating such.

Is it solely privacy concerns that make you pull the health card? I'm pretty sure the overall positive effect on your health from getting up to manually switch lights and change the channel on the TV would be negligible; there are far better ways to get your daily exercise.

> Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch

I can, but I don't want to. Is that unreasonable?

I've quite enjoyed adding automation to my home. My outdoor lights slowly brighten as it gets dark outside - not by a timer, but by checking the actual times of sunrise / sunset as well as how cloudy it is, which might make it darker sooner. I can check my phone to ensure my doors are locked and my garage door is closed and my yard lights are off. I get a notification when the washer / dryer are finished. When I'm done working, I say a simple command and my office lights fade as my desktop locks.

I can set timers and check my laundry and then wait the extra 5 minutes it adjusted to finish. I can log out and hit the switch on the way out. I can get up every evening and turn on the outside lights and then turn them off in the morning. I can adjust my thermostat once I get up instead of 15 minutes before. But I don't really want to.

As a programmer, having an API for my home has been tons of fun. Controlling some of that API with my voice has been as well.

That said, I've made sure everything still works when my pi is down, because sometimes a light switch is, you know, simpler.

> My outdoor lights slowly brighten as it gets dark outside - not by a timer, but by checking the actual times of sunrise / sunset as well as how cloudy it is, which might make it darker sooner.

Sounds like a task best handled locally with a light sensor. Why mess with indirect inputs such as sunrise/sunset times and weather reports, which incidentally imply connectivity (and therefore more potential points of failure and vulnerabilities) when a simple, standalone solution exists?

Now you have to figure out where to put your light sensor so that it's not affected by the outdoor lights. And then get power / connectivity to it, keep it clean etc etc.

Sounds like a task that had better have a good software-only fallback, because not many people are going to have a light sensor. And if the software-only implementation works well enough, why would they buy one?

I may use a light sensor as a backup or even the primary driver for how bright the lights are. I just haven't gotten there yet.

You're spot on about connectivity, although I could potentially keep a table of sunrise / sunset times to reference while offline.

These outside lights were my very first foray into home automation after I'd moved into our new house. It's been working so well, that I just kept going with other things. Until this thread, I'd practically forgotten about the automation.

>I can, but I don't want to. Is that unreasonable?

Yes. Consider the amount of movement/exercise the average western person gets, it might even be life threatening.

It's based on the inability to distinguish between useful and marginal technology (especially when the latter also has tons of adverse side effects, such as security and privacy issues).

>As a programmer, having an API for my home has been tons of fun. Controlling some of that API with my voice has been as well.

As part of a hobby it can be OK (hobbies don't have to have utility, and we can even spend resources to have fun doing them). As it's sold (and bought for) to and by the masses, it's beyond useless.

I'm sorry, I don't see the connection between my health and whether or not I use light switches. That seems incredibly hyperbolic. I definitely don't exercise enough. Turning off my home automation is not a gym membership and a force of will.

I agree that Security and Privacy issues are always important to consider, and ideally we in the tech industry will find better ways to educate the masses about the issues at hand.

>I'm sorry, I don't see the connection between my health and whether or not I use light switches.

That's because this is only considering the direct first order effects, and at isolation on this or that particular person, and not second order effects and general consequences of such an attitude. My argument was more about the latter.

Having a particular (European) kind of mindset, I don't argue about what some unique snowflake might or might not do, not care about people's "personal responsibility" to balance things properly themselves. Instead I care about general trends and societal effects stemming from such an attitude. A person could have automated his lights and toiler flushing and whatever, and also be a multi-marathon runner. Perfectly possible, but obviously not statistically significant enough to base any argument upon.

>Yes. Consider the amount of movement/exercise the average western person gets, it might even be life threatening.

That seems like a massive stereotype there. I just don't see how changing the lighting in your house from a switch to audio could be "life threatening". You have zero idea what physical fitness the individual above does. I also don't understand how asking, "What is the weather like outside?" while tying your shoes is an issue. I don't think this is Asimov level of automation. It's just a mild convenience.

>That seems like a massive stereotype there. I just don't see how changing the lighting in your house from a switch to audio could be "life threatening". You have zero idea what physical fitness the individual above does.

Obviously it's the mindset that's killing us, so that's a moot point. Besides, the statistics support the "massive stereotype" very well.

> Yes. Consider the amount of movement/exercise the average western person gets, it might even be life threatening.

You need to remember that an individual is not the average person. Yes, maybe it's damaging for the "average" person (though who really _knows_). But you can't say it's unreasonable for this poster specifically, unless you know their life.

>You need to remember that an individual is not the average person.

Thanks, that's my point exactly, which I tried to explain in my response comments. I never talk about the individual in a general discussion -- and don't even care what one might or might not do.

I live in a studio with 8 lights, 2 over my desk, 4 over my living room, 2 over my bed (how I setup the place). The two light switches are wired to 4 and 4. Alexa + light control lets me group them into desk, living room, common area (desk + living room), bedroom, all lights. It's more convenient than light switches which give me absolutes of all on or too many on depending on what I'm doing. The alternative is to rewire the place, which I do not own.

If you're using smart color-changing schedule-keeping lights then your light switch Must Never Be Turned Off. It's kind of a pain in the ass, really.

Personally I just have like three tablets of various vintages floating around the apartment, all with the light control app on them.

> Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch?

Why do you need a television remote? Why can't you just stand up and, you know, change the channel on your TV?

You're just drawing some arbitrary line in the sand and passing moral judgement on everyone on the other side. My guess is that in 30 years, having every light in your house controlled by a physical switch will be as quaint as TVs with rotary channel dials.

Not to mention that if you're like me, you'll always flip two other wrong switches on the same panel before finding the one you wanted.

> My guess is that in 30 years, having every light in your house controlled by a physical switch will be as quaint as TVs with rotary channel dials.

Maybe, but it certainly won't be echo/home that results in that. Voice control for lights is fantastic in certain situations, like when you're in bed and want to turn the lights off. Or on the couch about to start a movie.

But it absolutely sucks to say "alexa, turn on the lights" when you walk in the room. It's slower and it's more frustrating than just flipping the switch right next to you (and the connectivity delay is readily apparent) Maybe motion detectors or some other form of tracking people in the house will augment this to relegate switches to the dustbin of history, but it's definitely not voice assistants and crappy phone controls that are going to do it.

OTOH - It's pretty damn cool to say "Alexa, turn on the room lights" _before_ you get to the room or "Alexa, turn off the room lights" _after_ you've walked upstairs and realized you're not going back to that room.

Why aren't you just using torches or candles? Isn't that what tools are for?

My bedroom has a light switch by the door that turns on the fan light. I have canned lights as well but the switch is on the other side of the room in the bathroom (why God why?!). I have two lamps on their respective night stands plugged into always on outlets.

If I leave the room then chances are I'll first have to walk across the room to shut off one of the 3 lights not controlled by the switch at the door.

Instead I have two smart plugs on the lamps. I can operate simply by saying "Alexa turn on the lights".

If I enter the room with a load of laundry in my arms, I don't have to fiddle with a switch.

If I am leaving the room, I don't have to run around turning off lights.

If I wake up in the middle of the night I don't have to grope around the back of my night stand for the switch on my lamp cord.

I can also set a schedule when I am away to make it appear that I am home.

It's useful.

Just to do a thought experiment and ignoring your existing biases, imagine if you had two options always in every room in your house -- one is to ask Alexa and the other is to flick the switch, over time what do you think you will gravitate towards?

You're letting your biases show a bit harshly here.

You know what one of my primary use cases is? Changing the song that's playing while working out without going and finding my phone. I can control my house from my stationary bike.

Ultimately, devices like these allow me to be a more active contributor to my household by freeing up my hands of the endless trivial tasks that would otherwise occupy me. My productivity in the kitchen alone has doubled since introducing a Google Home to my counter.

Do you ever use a tv remote?

What's ridiculous about the home automation part is how users automate their homes by buying these absurdly expensive light bulbs, wifi enabled smart home bulbs $30-$100+, just to turn on an individual light. Not to mention, the more wifi devices you have in your house, the worse the coverage gets. Also, people don't seem to care about their privacy, all of these devices are always recording, in some cases even when muted.

There's a quote from Douglas Adams - "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things"; in the decade and a half or so since he wrote that, things seem to have moved even faster, and now I would possibly restate that to twenty-five.

Recently I've been reconsidering my outlook on new things, and though I dismissed Alexa as a fad, I now own two Dots, a couple of Hue bulbs, and some smart outlets. They solved some basic issues really well:

- No ceiling light in the living room, which is my apartment's entry, "Alexa, turn on floor lamp", beats walking across the room in the dark to find the foot switch

- My bedroom lights didn't have a dimmer, being able to say "Alexa, set bedroom to 35%"

- I have Sonos in most rooms, so I like to leave music for the dogs when I leave the house, "Alexa, play jazz music in living room", beats using the app on my phone

- "Alexa, what's the news?" to get five minutes of news from NPR in the morning is more enjoyable than looking at my phone

Anyway, my point is that a small investment resulted in me having some tech that, though minor, does improve my life. And this re-evaluating new things idea makes me feel less like an old curmudgeon (of thirty-eight).

I'd like to add that I'm over 40 years old and I just purchased a bunch of these devices for my home. I'll have an Echo in at least 4 rooms. It will be connected to my garage doors, some of my lights, my thermostat and we'll use them to play music.

I don't think they are "against the natural order of things". They have some privacy problems but they also have the potential to change our lives in small ways that are valuable.

Weather... I live in the midwest. Looking out the window tlls me absolutely nothing. There could be a line of storm coming towards me with potential cells of tornados. But that's maybe 30 to 50 miles away while it's sunny and nice outside.

Most of the Echo use among my family is music. They just want something they can stream and listen as background noise. Sometimes they use it as a radio station. Nothing more beyond that.

> For $30, an Echo is a steal.

For an extra $5 they'll throw in a smart plug https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KWEAH1K

Got this deal a week and some change back, along with a separate two-pack to dip my toes into home automation.

The TP-Link smart plugs will work in full concert only about 75% of the time; it's Home => Kasa, then an Alexa => Kasa integration.

"Ok Alexa, turn off/on the Living Room" gives me hilarious permutations of which of the three light up, are delayed, need to be asked again, etc. I've done enough wireless network testing locally to know it isn't network strength getting in the way.

It was a nice toe-dip and I'll probably keep messing with the idea of home automation...but I am really not impressed with the lack of responsiveness and consistency. Probably going to shift gears more to localized automation next without involving the cloud.

Ugh, these things still aren't stateful enough to hit eventual consistency? Thats not much different than the X10 stuff I was playing with more than a decade ago. I had a few outdoor lights that controlled from a computer and serial adapter and just had to blast whatever command I wanted several times and hoped it worked.

My wife nearly jettisoned the smart plugs after 5x attempting to get them all to turn on at once. Worse, sometimes a command will hang, leaving two lights on and the other one just randomly lights up a few minutes later.

The eTekcity 1Tx/5Rx remote outlets running on (I'm pretty certain) 433.92Mhz that these TP-Link smart plugs replaced work every single time. (Going back to those is sounding better, now that I think about it.)

Yep, I don't have time to look at my phone, go to a website etc. always, or want to. I spend enough time looking at screens all day and night. It is nice to be doing something else and ask Alexa with my voice, which is doing nothing at the moment, what the weather is, the price of bitcoin is, to play Mozart, etc.

Yup! This is exactly what I've been thinking.

Are we really going to fearmonger about HomePods, Echos, and Google Homes when we have a microphone on our laptops/cellphones?

What about the larger cost to the environment?

Is it worth having rare earth minerals mined by literal slaves in Africa and China?

Is it worth the energy associated with transporting the resources, processing them, assembling the device and delivering it to you?

All for the convenience of not pulling out your phone while you are tying your shoes?

I do not understand this uncritical consumption. $30 may be 'a steal', but think about whom you are stealing from.

That seems like something of a defeatist argument, considering everything from the phone the person would be pulling out of their pocket to the pants the pocket is in to the shoes that are being tied to the door they're getting ready to walk out of was probably, in some form, produced by an unfair labor market or a company who has a less-than-stellar environmental record.

Removing a single consumer electronic device from your life isn't going to impact those global markets - they're problems best tackled at a different scale.

they're problems best tackled at a different scale.

I'm curious. Which way?

I'm not sethhochberg, but if I had to guess: Government regulations.

'Removing a single consumer electronic device from your life isn't going to impact those global markets' <- Indeed it will not. Only if society begins viewing owning and using resources differently (which will happen eventually once certain resources get scarce), change will happen.

This is why I am so pessimistic about humanity. It's an outrageous opinion to sacrifice even a bit of convenience for not using resources.

I see the angry downvotes pouring in on my previous post because (unsurprisingly) people get angry at having their consumerist lifestyle criticised.

For the record, I downvoted you and am not angry at all about your posts.

And how is this contributing to the debate?

If you were to cite verifiable sources I would say this is a fair point.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953

Hardware teardown of an early generation echo. Worst, all of this is electronic waste in a few years.

We all do this and just by design, smartphones and laptops are not made to last. We accumulate such a staggering about of waste considering the energy/resources used to produce this.

The larger problem is that technology enables us to consume more, so I don't see how technology can ever solve the problem unless a serious shift in perception happens.

I'd guess Teichopsia was more interested in sources about slave labor, energy costs, and environmental impact.

E.g. [https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-what-we-die-for-child-... | This Is What We Die For: Child Slaves Made Your Phone Battery]

Great article a few years ago from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-...

Yes, yes it is.

As a counterpoint, it seems like everyone under 30 years old does not know how to drive anywhere without navigation assistance. People aren't learning how to read a map. Whenever I am in the car with someone else I have to direct them where to go. If you use devices or software to do everything for you, you do not develop any intuition for how things work or where things are.

There's a difference between being able to read a map and having memorized a map. I read maps all the time, be it google maps or even the maps in video games. But I rely entirely on navigation to get places because memorizing a map is not something I find value in.

I don't think that's a bad thing, either. This is how thousands of years of social progress happened. We stopped learning how to use sun dials. We stopped learning how to use a sextant. These were replaced by superior implementations and the world moved on to bigger & better things.

> People aren't learning how to read a map.

So what? If relying on GPS navigation erodes ability to read a map, doesn't relying on a map also erode ability to navigate by intuition or ability to follow verbal navigation instructions?

I actually agree with the claim the heavy use of GPS navigation erodes ability to navigate successfully without it, though I have only anecdotal evidence of this. My own ability to navigate definitely seems to have declined when I started relying on GPS nav frequently, first Garmin/TomTom and now Google maps. But so what? Overall I'm significantly more efficient at navigating now overall.

Net net it's a gain, which is the very promise of technology. (Almost) No one laments the decline in ability to type on a manual typewriter that has come from the rise of general purpose computing or the decline in ability to use an abacus or sliderule that has come from the creation of calculators. The loss of these skills is far outweighed by the benefits.

Not to take the bait & segue too much, but maps have been a core part of navigation for centuries upon centuries, and they generally teach & augment your own ability to navigate rather than navigate for you.

No one misses the technical skill to use a sextant, typewriter, or sliderule. Those things are in a sense just drudgery. But if you lose the ability to navigate, compose, or do math in the process, that's a different story.

Horses have been a core part of warfare for centuries upon centuries.

There's probably plenty of useful skills being a mounted soldier taught you that driving a tank doesn't. Those skills, if they're still useful today, are learned another way.

If horses taught you high level (not horse-specific) military strategy that tanks didn't, then yes there might be an issue at hand.

Those would be very exceptional horses. And very powerful maps.

>doesn't relying on a map also erode ability to navigate by intuition //

It doesn't, you still use your situational awareness, the same observations (to locate where you are on your map), the same site of direct observations.

For me it's like the difference between waking around a building blindfolded following a voice instruction and following a floor plan. In the former case (as for satnav) I'm lost without the aid; in the latter case I can not only navigate the same route but also find places I didn't visit before because I noticed then in passing in order to orient myself.

FWIW I use satnav and don't consider it a great wrong, but if I want to know a route or learn about an area then map following is much better.

Bullshit. People can still read maps.

You'd be surprised. Road maps maybe, given we all still drive and Google Maps is full of them. But topographical maps, for example, are alien to a huge portion of the population.

Source: I help teach adults to read topo maps every year

Outside of a narrow range of people (and jobs), how often is a topographical map even relevant to daily life?

I can think of two, maybe three times in my entire life I've even had a reason to look at one.

It's like saying you need to know how to read aeronautical maps. While a pilot might need to, and maybe those doing balloon based projects or drones might as well, the average person couldn't possibly care less.

I fought against having a GPS in the car for years. It was the biggest single source of arguments with my partner yet still I didn't want to dumb myself with tech.

It's most definitely the most helpful device I've ever bought, second to a mobile phone. Switching to a smartphone from my old Nokia didn't improve my life, adding a TomTom in my car did.

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