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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

> Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn't remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

Back in the day, I knew the phone numbers of all my friends and family off the top of my head.

After the advent of mobile phones, I’ve outsourced that part of my memory to my phone and now the only phone numbers I know are my wife’s and my own.

There is a real cost to outsourcing certain knowledge from your brain, but also a cost to putting it there in the first place.

One of the challenges of an AI future is going to be finding the balance between what to outsource and what to keep in your mind - otherwise knowledge of complex systems and how best to use and interact with them will atrophy.

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There is also a cost to future encoding of relevant information - I (roughly) recall an experiment with multiple rounds of lectures where participants took notes in a text document, and some were allowed to save the document while others weren't.

Those who could save had worse recall of the information, however they had better recall of information given in the next round without note taking. Suggests to me there are limits to retention/encoding in a given period, and offloading retention frees resources for future encoding in that period.

Also that study breaks are important :)

Anecdotally, I often feel that learning thing 'pushes another out', especially if the things are learnt closely together.

Similarly, I'm less likely to retain something if I know someone I'm with has that information - essentially indexing that information in social knowledge graphs.

Pros and cons.

We've already seen part of this with turn-by-turn GPS navigation. People enable it to go to the stores they've been to so many times already. I understand going some place for the first time, but every. single. time. just shows the vast majority of people are quite happy outsourcing the most basic skills. After all, if it means they can keep up with the Ks easier, then it's a great invention

I’ve lived in the same house for 17 years. I will still often use a map app to navigate home as it can know more about the traffic backups/delays than I can.

It’s not just for getting home, but for getting home as efficiently as possible without added stress.

True, although "back in the day" people used to memorize at what times during the day certain routes were busy, and they took alternative routes ("the back roads" in my area) to get around traffic that could be predicted.

We've outsourced that to an app, too.

It also has information on store closing times/dates (some stores are closed on random days of the week, or close early on others), unexpected detours (construction, previously announced road work), speed traps (crowdsourced), and more.

Some of it simply wasn't possible before the technology came along.

> True, although "back in the day" people used to memorize at what times during the day certain routes were busy, and they took alternative routes ("the back roads" in my area) to get around traffic that could be predicted.

I think "memorize" has the wrong connotation of rote memorization, like you were memorizing data from a table. I think it was more like being observant and learning from that.

> We've outsourced that to an app, too.

The technology lets you turn off your brain so it can atrophy.

In a big enough city that information is too dynamic to memorize. Car crashes, road work, sports events, presidential visits all caused their own microclimate that was not part of the everyday rush hour.

It's interesting, because maps (all of them) will reliably toss me onto a far more convoluted path home vs staying on the interstate.

The former has ~15 traffic lights vs the latter ~2.

Imho, one of the most corrosive aspects of GPS has been mystifying navigation, due to over reliance on weird street connections. Versus the conceptually simply (if slightly longer) routes we used to take.

Unfortunately, with the net effect that people who only use GPS think the art of manual street navigation is impossibly complex.

In the early 2000s, I had developed via trial-and-error a very convoluted typical route home, cutting through some neighborhoods to bypass interchanges that were typically heavily backed-up during the evening rush hour. It would shave 10 minutes minimum, and sometimes 15-20.

Shortly after 2010, that route became much less useful [due to heavily increased traffic] and when a colleague told me that I should try Waze, I realized that Waze was now sending a bunch of traffic down "my" route home.

Waze sure pissed of a lot of owners of million dollar homes in west LA and Santa Monica when they sent a bunch of assholes speeding through those neighborhoods at 60 MPH

I assumed that was just how everyone drove on LA surface streets, always.

> Imho, one of the most corrosive aspects of GPS has been mystifying navigation, due to over reliance on weird street connections. Versus the conceptually simply (if slightly longer) routes we used to take.

This, exactly!

Many years ago I realized constant GPS use meant I had no idea how to get around the city I'd lived in for years, and had huge gaps in my knowledge of how it fit together.

To fix that, I:

1) ditched the GPS,

2) started using Google Maps printouts where I manually simplified its routes to maximize use of arterial roads, and

3) bought a city map as a backup in case I got lost (this was pre-smartphone).

It actually worked, and I finally learned how to get around.

I find that having a GPS all the time in my pocket has really done wonders in my ability to understand how the city fits together. Not driving everywhere probably plays some part in that too.

The key distinction that prompts learning to me is switching to "north is always up" mode.

"In front is always in front" deserves to die a fiery death.

People should damn well know how to orient on a map.

I mean this view is nice when you are actually moving

> I find that having a GPS all the time in my pocket has really done wonders in my ability to understand how the city fits together.

How? The problem is GPS routing takes you on all kinds of one-off shortcuts which are a poor framework for general navigation, and tend to lack repetition. It also relieves you of the need to think on the way from A to B.

> Not driving everywhere probably plays some part in that too.

I could see that as being helpful, but that's only really doable in a small area, like a city center. You're not going to learn a metro area that way.

I have more or less the same thought as you (that a phone mapping app isn't helpful overall), but I can see how the moving map functionality and pinch-to-zoom would be helpful to learn the overview of an area, in a way that I think the turn-by-turn optimized navigation is harmful.

You can learn a metro area piecemeal.

*Fortunately* (for manual street navigators), people who only use GPS think the art of manual street navigation is impossibly complex. During heavy traffic, we can use maps to find out where those people are being herded, and manually navigate even more efficiently. Also: it's nice to know if there's an accident somewhere.

I find Apple maps is very good in this regard and will keep you on the highway even if the traffic is higher and the route longer, because usually over average it's faster.

I see a lot of people exiting when they see traffic come on and I can't help but shake my head. We've all tried it before, and it almost never works.

The value of Apple maps to me is if there's HUGE traffic - like an accident closing 3 lanes. Often there's no indication of this otherwise, and you can be stuck for a whole nother hour. But Maps knows, and it'll put you on a longer highway to get away from it.

I no longer use apple maps in my daily commute (1.5 hours one way). But, when I did, it caught quite a few huge accidents. Now I leave the office earlier and the likelihood of accidents is much lower, so I don't need Maps. Even so, once in a blue moon I'll be in a sticky situation.

It's helpful to gauge your arrival time as well.

I can still remember all my high school friends' phone numbers though. Just not the numbers of anyone I met in the 30 years since.

I can remember the phone number for the local Best Buy which I called a lot as a teenager to find out when new games came in stock.

This was one of the points Neil Postman made in "Technopoly", 30 years ago. Every new technology introduced to the society is a negotiation with the culture. It may bring some benefits, but will also re-define or even takes something away.

It's nice that these days I can talk to my father in some fancy messaging/video call apps. But the other day I had to give him a phone call, as I was dialing the number I noticed some melody echoed in my mind. Then I remembered when I was little, in order to memorize his number(so that I could call him from the landline), I made a song out of it.

I think it ironic that visionaries and optimists see AI as freeing humanity, where our reliance on it will make us subordinate to it and its owners.

100% this. When we outsource something to the extent that we're incapable of doing it ourselves, we place ourselves at the mercy of those who control it.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hopes that this would set them free. But this just allowed other men with machines to control them."

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

I suspect that outsourcing as much of our lives to others (i.e. the corporations and the governments they control) is exactly what they want. AI is just the next thing that happens to be extremely useful for that plan.

Who is they? there is no plan here, it’s just everyone making similar decisions when faced with a similar set of incentives and tools, the reason those corporations can make money, is because they add value to the people who use them, if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a business.

They've stopped adding value and started milking for $$$ long ago.

>> I suspect that outsourcing as much of our lives to others (i.e. the corporations and the governments they control) is exactly what they want. AI is just the next thing that happens to be extremely useful for that plan.

> Who is they?

The decentralized collective of corporations and governments that understand they can take advantage of us outsourcing our lives.

> there is no plan here, it’s just everyone making similar decisions when faced with a similar set of incentives and tools

There doesn't need to be a master plan here, just a decentralize set of smaller plans the align with the same incentive to use technology to create dependency.

> the reason those corporations can make money, is because they add value to the people who use them, if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a business.

No. For instance, lots of hard drugs destroy their users, rather than "add[ing] value to the people who use them." The businesses that provide them still make money.

It's a myth that the market is a machine that just provides value to consumers. It's really a machine that maximizes value extraction by the most powerful participants. Modern technological innovations have allowed for a greater amount of value extraction from the consumers at the bottom.

I have also outsourced many of those Basic system administrative tasks, except instead of using an AI, I outsourced it to a bunch of .sh files.

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