A substantial group that memorizes a foreign-language (to many) text are Muslim huffaz, who commit the entire Koran to memory. They'd make a good comparison group, given their large numbers, ethnic heterogeneity and worldwide distribution.
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.