"Earlier studies of the brain of the cabbie had already noted the increase in "grey matter" in the hippocampus, an area found at the base of the brain."
I haven’t seen any studies of what they might give up in the process, though it does involve a lot of sitting.
Example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...
Kind of casts the whole dispute with Uber thing into a whole different light, doesn't it?
I am sorry for their sunk cost, but really minicabs+gps and now uber/Lyft et al are as good, or would be if taxis didn’t have a pick up monopoly.
This can of course be replicated with a computer, but a simple GPS is not going to cut it. Advanced machine learning, voice recognition like nothing I have ever seen, very good A.I. to resolve misunderstandings about where tourists and other non frequent travellers might really want to go instead of where they actually said. And so on and so on. We can get there. An underpaid, recently started and soon to be replaced, stressed uber driver in his uncles car armed with a GPS app is just not going to cut it. Yet.
Uber doesn't allow hailing from the street either.
IIRC at the exam you could get questions like "The passenger tells you that his cousin mentioned a building with a bas-relief of Holy Mary holding Jesus, it was right around the angle from his hotel, but he does not remember the hotel's name".
You are supposed to know the place and the best way to get there, based on just this (also, a good number of "knowledgeable" taxi drivers go for an official London Tour Guide exam soon after, with relatively little effort, considering they have already memorized thousands of places, monuments and architectural details).
Different customers might prefer different total packages on different occasions.
I for one rarely need the more expensive Driver-with-the-Knowledge option, especially when I can ask Google many of the same questions.
Looks we agree about everything that we actually made explicit. The disagreement was about the implicit meaning of whether price was included in the meaning of 'better job'.
A theoretical machine could do a better job. In practice, we can't build anything that can reason about routes anywhere near as well as London cabbies do. And I'd say that even without knowing about The Knowledge.
Pamar's comment above has a very good example of the kind of thing "a machine" is still very, very far from achieving.
this is funny because the British actually did that exactly with imposition of english education to create the obedient clerk class for their colony, and claimed it was in fact liberation
and then the germans claimed sanskrit was theirs and could not possibly be of indian local origin and nazi-fied the 'aryan' language
and of course no european scholar could countenance the possibility of hindu epics like the ramayana and mahabharata let alone the vedas could be older than the homeric epics of greek civilization and conveniently 'dated' all indian history to preserve their superiority