3 ms·

For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without

by zdw 1y ago

For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software. Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.

heisenbit 1y ago
GPS allowed me to go where I would have been hesitant to venture before.
- PessimalDecimal 1y ago
  Can you draw this analogy or a bit? What hesitation has an LLM helped you overcome?
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    With an LLM Agent (specifically an agent, not a web page chat) I can go from idea to 50-80% execution in 30 minutes. Then I can pretty quickly see whether my idea was a good one or not. It's so easy and quick to build tiny bespoke tools now, that I'm building them left and right. Some stay with me and I use them regularly, the others I forget. But I didn't have to spend hours and hours building them so the time-cost is not an issue.
LPisGood 1y ago
Why do you consider relying on navigation apps to be over dependency? Planning a route is basically an entirely useless skill for most people, and if they do need to for some odd reason, it’s pretty easy.
- zdw 1y ago
  In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless you've done it before. Most people have little idea where they are and no idea what they would do next if the turn-by-turn tech failed on them. I'd argue it is useful the first time you want to take a scenic route, or optimize for things other than shortest travel time, like a loop bike route that avoids major streets. Not to say that apps aren't useful in replacing the paper map, or doing things like adding up the times required (which isn't new - there used to be tables in the back of many maps with distances and durations between major locations).
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    > In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless you've done it before. I always feel like they aren't even trying. Like you just make a point were you are, a point were you want to do, draw a straight line, take the nearest streets, and then you can optimize ad libitum.
    - zelphirkalt 1y ago
      Shockingly, many people don't dare doing that any longer.
WillAdams 1y ago
And for the societal cost of that see stories such as: https://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-misleading-travel-companion https://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-m... and for the way this mindset erodes values and skills: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/08/07/six-lieutenants-getting-booted-from-the-corps-after-allegedly-cheating-on-land-navigation-course/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018...
- IshKebab 1y ago
  The "societal cost" you linked literally says this happens with paper maps too. The cause is incorrect maps, not GPS. (And of course, idiotic behaviour... but GPS doesn't cause that.) Overall GPS has been an absolutely enormous benefit for society with barely any downside other than nostalgia for map reading.
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    I think that is exactly the point, that leads people to act in idiotic ways: GPS has been too damn good, so people blindly trust it, even second guessing or ignoring their own perception. The more reliable and easy to access a tool is, the more we trust it and often blindly trust it.
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
But this is just proof that long ago we ceded The ballad of John Henry was written in the 1840s “Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then If you gave up anything that was previously called “AI” we would not have computers, cars, airplanes or any type of technology whatsoever anywhere
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then Sure, and it was wrong because it turns out the conductor does get rewarded. Given train strikes that had to be denied as recently as a few years ago, it's clear that's an essential role 150 years later. With how they want to frame AI as replacing labor, who's being rewarded long term for its thinking? Who's really being serviced?
  - AndrewKemendo 1y ago
    Then its firmly an organizational problem with how reward is allocated in human society. Humans haven’t figured out how to include all humans and ecological systems into the same “tribe” and therefore the infighting between artificially segregated human groups, disconnected with ecological “externalities” which prevents a sustainable cooperative solution. So most likely it will continue to be a small number of humans dominating the rest with increasingly powerful tools that reduce the number of humans required to act in active domination or displacement roles. Humanity long ago decided that its everyone for themselves and to encode “might makes right” into ritual, mythology and organizational formation-operations.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Yes. And do we know what this leads to in history? Conflicts, violent uprising, coups, and wars. At some point, the population reaches a breaking point and outs the oppressors. This happening as recent as last month, so 2025 isn't any different from 1525. The tool itself doesn't matter, but the people are falling into the same cycle once again. I can see LLM's used ethically and carefully managed to assist the populace. That's clearly not what's happening and is the entire reason I'm against them. It's tiring being dismissed as a luddite just because I don't want big tech to yet again recklessly ransack the populace with no oversight.
foxglacier 1y ago
It seems arbitrary to set the limit of how much pointless busywork we need as just the amount you're used to. Maybe maps are already dumbing it down too much and we should work out directions from a textual description of landmarks and compass bearings that's not specific to our route? In my opinion, dependency on turn-by-turn directions is fine because we do actually have the machines to do it for us. We're equally dependent on all sorts of useful things that free us to think about something actually useful that really can't be done for us. For example, consumer law means we can walk into a shop and buy something without negotiating a contract with each seller and working out all the ways we might get cheated. Maybe the place to draw the line is different for each individual and depends on if they're really spending their freed-up time doing something useful or wasting it doing something unproductive and self-destructive.
jncfhnb 1y ago
I don’t have an inkling of how to navigate. I don’t really see the problem.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  I just can't comprehend how people can accept that. I mean sure you can use your handheld computer, but when I wouldn't know where I am and what I need to do to go to where I intend to be, I would feel very alone, lost and abandoned, like being Napoleon on Elba. In a completely foreign city, often I just look at a map before the journey for the general direction and then just keep running, without thinking much. That works quite well, because street design is actually logical and where it isn't there are signs. I'm surprised that you often wouldn't even need a map; because you just need to look at the signs, they will tell you.
  - jncfhnb 1y ago
    Idk man I think maybe you should consider that there’s no upside to this insecurity. I’ve blitzed through the formerly famous Tokyo subway system mindlessly without a clue. I have utterly no idea what the different us highways in my area are but it’s never really affected me besides being unable to join in mundane discussions of traffic on 95 or whatever
port11 1y ago
I always thought I had a good sense of navigation, until I realised it was getting quite bad. More or less at the same time I found “Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology”, and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I put the book down and refused to read any more until my navigation skills improved. They're quite good now. I sit at the toilet staring at the map of my city, which I now know quite well. No longer navigate with my phone. I'm scared about the chapter on communication, which I'm going through right now. I do think we're losing those skills, and offloading more thinking to technology will further erode your own abilities. Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition activities, but will you? Will all of us?
- 1718627440 1y ago
  > and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I Don't leave as hanging, what were they saying?
  - port11 1y ago
    Hmm, it's very well written and I don't mean to butcher it. It touches on how the people of Polinesia would navigate and do it better than Western colonisers. It mentions tricks such as memorising reference points, understanding the cardinal directions, and whatnot. Print a map of your city and put it in the loo. I don't know, it's a great book and I won't do it any justice.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition activities, but will you? Will all of us? When I can get a full time job again, I plan to. I was trying to learn how to 3d model before the tech scene exploded 3 years ago. I'm probably not trying to take back all 12 factors (I'm fine with where my writing is as of now, even if it is subpar), but I am trying to focus on what parts are important to me as a person and not take any shortcuts out of them.
crazygringo 1y ago
And so what? Why not be dependent? I grew up with a glove box full of atlases in my car. On one job, I probably spent 30 minutes a day planning the ~4h of driving I'd do daily to different sites. Looking up roads in indexes, locating grid numbers, finding connecting roads spanning pages 22-23, 42-43, 62-63, and 64-65. Marking them and trying not to get confused with other markings I'd made over the past months. Getting to intersections and having no idea which way to turn because the angles were completely different from on the map (yes this is a thing with paper maps) and you couldn't see any road signs and the car behind you is honking. What a waste of time. It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person. I don't miss it the same way I don't miss long division.
- tdrz 1y ago
  > It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person. Yes, it did.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Believe me, it didn't. Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. It just takes a lot of time. It's busywork.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. And people can't go that far to begin with. SThat's the scary part. These little things we think of as insignificant add up and give us our ability to think. Change how we perceive and navigate (no pun intended) the world. Letting one or two of these factors rust probably won't cost us, but how far off are we really from the WALL-E future of we automate all our cognition, our spatial reasoning, and our curiosity?
      - crazygringo 1y ago
        Yeah but it's not like everyone could back then either. My mom had a masters degree but couldn't read a map to save her life. On the other hand, I never "learned", it was just obvious. I could rotate in my brain without trying. I think we're nowhere close to WALL-E, nor are we headed in that direction. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important.
sotix 1y ago
My mom can't get to our lake house anymore without GPS even though she's been driving there for forty years. To be fair, a wild amount of construction and development has occurred around it in the past 15 years, but the road signs still point you in the right direction.

by zdw 1y ago

heisenbit 1y ago

GPS allowed me to go where I would have been hesitant to venture before.

PessimalDecimal 1y ago
Can you draw this analogy or a bit? What hesitation has an LLM helped you overcome?
- theshrike79 1y ago
  With an LLM Agent (specifically an agent, not a web page chat) I can go from idea to 50-80% execution in 30 minutes. Then I can pretty quickly see whether my idea was a good one or not. It's so easy and quick to build tiny bespoke tools now, that I'm building them left and right. Some stay with me and I use them regularly, the others I forget. But I didn't have to spend hours and hours building them so the time-cost is not an issue.

LPisGood 1y ago

Why do you consider relying on navigation apps to be over dependency? Planning a route is basically an entirely useless skill for most people, and if they do need to for some odd reason, it’s pretty easy.

zdw 1y ago
In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless you've done it before. Most people have little idea where they are and no idea what they would do next if the turn-by-turn tech failed on them. I'd argue it is useful the first time you want to take a scenic route, or optimize for things other than shortest travel time, like a loop bike route that avoids major streets. Not to say that apps aren't useful in replacing the paper map, or doing things like adding up the times required (which isn't new - there used to be tables in the back of many maps with distances and durations between major locations).
- 1718627440 1y ago
  > In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless you've done it before. I always feel like they aren't even trying. Like you just make a point were you are, a point were you want to do, draw a straight line, take the nearest streets, and then you can optimize ad libitum.
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    Shockingly, many people don't dare doing that any longer.

WillAdams 1y ago

And for the societal cost of that see stories such as: https://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-misleading-travel-companion https://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-m... and for the way this mindset erodes values and skills: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/08/07/six-lieutenants-getting-booted-from-the-corps-after-allegedly-cheating-on-land-navigation-course/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018...

IshKebab 1y ago
The "societal cost" you linked literally says this happens with paper maps too. The cause is incorrect maps, not GPS. (And of course, idiotic behaviour... but GPS doesn't cause that.) Overall GPS has been an absolutely enormous benefit for society with barely any downside other than nostalgia for map reading.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  I think that is exactly the point, that leads people to act in idiotic ways: GPS has been too damn good, so people blindly trust it, even second guessing or ignoring their own perception. The more reliable and easy to access a tool is, the more we trust it and often blindly trust it.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

But this is just proof that long ago we ceded The ballad of John Henry was written in the 1840s “Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then If you gave up anything that was previously called “AI” we would not have computers, cars, airplanes or any type of technology whatsoever anywhere

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then Sure, and it was wrong because it turns out the conductor does get rewarded. Given train strikes that had to be denied as recently as a few years ago, it's clear that's an essential role 150 years later. With how they want to frame AI as replacing labor, who's being rewarded long term for its thinking? Who's really being serviced?
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  Then its firmly an organizational problem with how reward is allocated in human society. Humans haven’t figured out how to include all humans and ecological systems into the same “tribe” and therefore the infighting between artificially segregated human groups, disconnected with ecological “externalities” which prevents a sustainable cooperative solution. So most likely it will continue to be a small number of humans dominating the rest with increasingly powerful tools that reduce the number of humans required to act in active domination or displacement roles. Humanity long ago decided that its everyone for themselves and to encode “might makes right” into ritual, mythology and organizational formation-operations.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Yes. And do we know what this leads to in history? Conflicts, violent uprising, coups, and wars. At some point, the population reaches a breaking point and outs the oppressors. This happening as recent as last month, so 2025 isn't any different from 1525. The tool itself doesn't matter, but the people are falling into the same cycle once again. I can see LLM's used ethically and carefully managed to assist the populace. That's clearly not what's happening and is the entire reason I'm against them. It's tiring being dismissed as a luddite just because I don't want big tech to yet again recklessly ransack the populace with no oversight.

foxglacier 1y ago

It seems arbitrary to set the limit of how much pointless busywork we need as just the amount you're used to. Maybe maps are already dumbing it down too much and we should work out directions from a textual description of landmarks and compass bearings that's not specific to our route? In my opinion, dependency on turn-by-turn directions is fine because we do actually have the machines to do it for us. We're equally dependent on all sorts of useful things that free us to think about something actually useful that really can't be done for us. For example, consumer law means we can walk into a shop and buy something without negotiating a contract with each seller and working out all the ways we might get cheated. Maybe the place to draw the line is different for each individual and depends on if they're really spending their freed-up time doing something useful or wasting it doing something unproductive and self-destructive.

jncfhnb 1y ago

I don’t have an inkling of how to navigate. I don’t really see the problem.

1718627440 1y ago
I just can't comprehend how people can accept that. I mean sure you can use your handheld computer, but when I wouldn't know where I am and what I need to do to go to where I intend to be, I would feel very alone, lost and abandoned, like being Napoleon on Elba. In a completely foreign city, often I just look at a map before the journey for the general direction and then just keep running, without thinking much. That works quite well, because street design is actually logical and where it isn't there are signs. I'm surprised that you often wouldn't even need a map; because you just need to look at the signs, they will tell you.
- jncfhnb 1y ago
  Idk man I think maybe you should consider that there’s no upside to this insecurity. I’ve blitzed through the formerly famous Tokyo subway system mindlessly without a clue. I have utterly no idea what the different us highways in my area are but it’s never really affected me besides being unable to join in mundane discussions of traffic on 95 or whatever

port11 1y ago

I always thought I had a good sense of navigation, until I realised it was getting quite bad. More or less at the same time I found “Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology”, and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I put the book down and refused to read any more until my navigation skills improved. They're quite good now. I sit at the toilet staring at the map of my city, which I now know quite well. No longer navigate with my phone. I'm scared about the chapter on communication, which I'm going through right now. I do think we're losing those skills, and offloading more thinking to technology will further erode your own abilities. Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition activities, but will you? Will all of us?

1718627440 1y ago
> and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I Don't leave as hanging, what were they saying?
- port11 1y ago
  Hmm, it's very well written and I don't mean to butcher it. It touches on how the people of Polinesia would navigate and do it better than Western colonisers. It mentions tricks such as memorising reference points, understanding the cardinal directions, and whatnot. Print a map of your city and put it in the loo. I don't know, it's a great book and I won't do it any justice.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition activities, but will you? Will all of us? When I can get a full time job again, I plan to. I was trying to learn how to 3d model before the tech scene exploded 3 years ago. I'm probably not trying to take back all 12 factors (I'm fine with where my writing is as of now, even if it is subpar), but I am trying to focus on what parts are important to me as a person and not take any shortcuts out of them.

crazygringo 1y ago

And so what? Why not be dependent? I grew up with a glove box full of atlases in my car. On one job, I probably spent 30 minutes a day planning the ~4h of driving I'd do daily to different sites. Looking up roads in indexes, locating grid numbers, finding connecting roads spanning pages 22-23, 42-43, 62-63, and 64-65. Marking them and trying not to get confused with other markings I'd made over the past months. Getting to intersections and having no idea which way to turn because the angles were completely different from on the map (yes this is a thing with paper maps) and you couldn't see any road signs and the car behind you is honking. What a waste of time. It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person. I don't miss it the same way I don't miss long division.

tdrz 1y ago
> It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person. Yes, it did.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Believe me, it didn't. Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. It just takes a lot of time. It's busywork.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. And people can't go that far to begin with. SThat's the scary part. These little things we think of as insignificant add up and give us our ability to think. Change how we perceive and navigate (no pun intended) the world. Letting one or two of these factors rust probably won't cost us, but how far off are we really from the WALL-E future of we automate all our cognition, our spatial reasoning, and our curiosity?
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      Yeah but it's not like everyone could back then either. My mom had a masters degree but couldn't read a map to save her life. On the other hand, I never "learned", it was just obvious. I could rotate in my brain without trying. I think we're nowhere close to WALL-E, nor are we headed in that direction. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important.

sotix 1y ago

My mom can't get to our lake house anymore without GPS even though she's been driving there for forty years. To be fair, a wild amount of construction and development has occurred around it in the past 15 years, but the road signs still point you in the right direction.