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Comment by kfcm | Hacker News Reader

  As a student from another city, I have only enough 
  understanding of the geography to read Google Maps 
  critically - for the details, it's indispensable.

Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7 years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google Maps.

People used to have maps, or just go out and explore new places. Not only learn the streets, but find great restaurants, coffee shops, stores, meet new and interesting people.

I am amazed daily at how these things have instilled learned helplessness into people in such a short time span.

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I'll be off your lawn in a moment, but first, you might want to consider that just because something can be done the old way doesn't mean that that's superior, that smartphones are in fact very good at showing you new places to go, and that "wanting machines to do tasks that machines are better at than humans" and "helplessness" are not synonymous.

Navigation is a perishable skill. Overreliance on GPS has been shown to degrade navigation skills and other brain functions [1].

1. http://phys.org/news/2010-11-reliance-gps-hippocampus-functi...

So? Using a calculator probably degrades your ability to do sums in your head, yet a calculator allows many people to do sums they wouldn't be able to do just in their heads.

And literacy degrades people's ability to memorize texts.

It does, and something is lost.

Storytelling is/was a great human tradition, perhaps the defining one in a literal sense. It's becoming extinct because of literacy. Today it's considered an eccentric pursuit.

That doesn't mean literacy is bad or that campfire stories repeated and evolved for generations are better than novels or films. But, oral storytelling as art or culture has characteristics that just aren't present in novels just like novels have characteristics that aren't present in TV shows.

If you are willing to be more abstract about it, you might compare it to working as an Apple engineer and collecting edible roots near a stream. The former is clearly superior as a way of feeding your family. The latter still has certain human qualities that are beneficial to people and worth preserving.

As we move forward we lose some things which may be valuable. Nostalgia and the desire to preserve is not a bad thing.

I recently realized that I like plays. Movies have mostly replaced them, which is a shame.

However, there are things that movies can do that plays definitely can't do, and the reverse is true as well.

I think that there's room for both!

I'm in my 40s - so I've spent most of my life using "normal" maps.

For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.

I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.

So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.

Without smartphones does not mean using paper maps. It means that featurephones would have eventually converged with offline GPS devices -- the Garmins and TomToms of the world.

In many ways, this would have been a better model for the navigating consumer. GPS devices operated on a one-time purchase model -- no subscription, no contracts, no data caps. Maps were shipped with the device, and many came with free lifetime updates. Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.

There are also broader implications. Without smartphones, AT&T and Verizon would have lost a lucrative revenue stream. Their best choice for deploying capital would have been to build fiber to the home. Not a bad trade -- smartphones for gigabit broadband in every house.

With wireless at a technological plateau, maybe T-Mobile and Sprint could have caught up. Perhaps we'd have seen more robust competition to the duopoly, and lower prices.

This is alternate history. But it's alternate history along the lines of Douglas North, who dared to question the economic benefits of railroads.

That would completely kill public transit navigation, however, which relies on live access to current public transit schedules and tracking data.

As I stated:

> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.

It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.

A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.

It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.

Yep, they would have added more and more features to these increasingly powerful, increasingly generalized electronic devices that fit in your pocket until... Oops, look at that, smartphones all over again.

Today's featurephones have GPS, navigation, mail, IM, sometimes even installable apps. In 2006, we would have considered them smartphones.

If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.

Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.

In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.

I'm afraid not, no. In 2006, a smartphone was something like a Palm Treo or an HTC TyTN. In fact, that's what a smartphone has been for over a decade. Even the price points have remained similar.

The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.

    > Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7
    > years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google
    > Maps

And by extension, people just 100 years ago survived (sometimes) without antibiotics. Or ATMs. Or television. Or commercial flight. Isn't amazing how helpless people have become?

Also, they didn't survive at all, they're all dead.

>People used to have maps

At one point, earlier, people didn't even have paper maps, so why stop there?

You're conflating helplessness with convenience. Yes, people used to do things the hard way. Now we get to do them the easy way.

Argue the convenience is not worth the privacy costs, but don't suggest the convenience is trifling. Sure, these tasks were all possible, but it's clear that a smart phone can replace your map, bus schedule, train schedule, subway map, Zagat guide—in many cases not only is it a substitute but a patent improvement.

The hypocrisy of posting this on a website eludes you, doesn't it? People used to communicate face-to-face, why are you here?

> Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7 years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google Maps.

Actually 10 years ago I got lost all the time, would ask my way to people with very vague memory and not much of a talent to give direction, in the worst cases I would pay a taxi after a while to bring me back to a known point, and got taxed huge amounts when the taxi guy would also get lost because the address wasn't correct.

Some people (i.e me) are really bad at orienting and reading maps. Before Google Maps I had a "dumbphone" with a GPS app, and it changed my life (even when going new places I could go back in a predictable amount of time. Imagine the impact).

Are you saying people did just as well when the only option was paper-based maps?

As someone who spent the majority of their life with only that option available, I very strongly doubt that.

Good point.

I'm guessing students were less bold with CTA and took more cabs, or else avoided going out unless they knew the could afford a lengthy adventure getting home.

It wasn't impossible before, but it's certainly easier.

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