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.
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?
>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.
> and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I
Don't leave as hanging, what were they saying?
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.
And for the societal cost of that see stories such as:
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...
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.
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.
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.
GPS allowed me to go where I would have been hesitant to venture before.
Can you draw this analogy or a bit? What hesitation has an LLM helped you overcome?
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.
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.
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
>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?
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.
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.
You’ve correctly identified the problem and the fact that this cycle is going to continue.
How do you think you can break the cycle?
Do you have a suggestion for what you are going to do about it?
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.
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).
> 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.
Shockingly, many people don't dare doing that any longer.
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.
> It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person.
Yes, it did.
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.
Although you're not learning any 'facts' or 'methods' you are training your 'sense of direction'. It's harder to put into words what this actually entails, but it is certainly a skill that you're getting better at the more you train it.
I know what you mean, but I'm being honest when I say it didn't.
I'm just lucky in that I've always had a sense of direction ever since I was little. It's not a skill I've ever had to develop. There's nothing to "get better at". Some people just seem to be born with it, and I got lucky.
>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?
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.
>. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important.
I'll ask point blank, then: what new "hard skills" are becoming more important in the short and mid terms that you see on the horizon? My biggest fears are that the technocrats very much want to raise a generation of "sheep" dependent on them to think. They don't need thinkers, only consumers.
In software development specifically, as line-level coding and testing becomes more automated, CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard.
And then communication, management, and people skills become more important each year. That's not stopping. It's only becoming more valuable, and a lot of people need to get a lot better at it.
Being an effective software developer is going to get much more challenging, skills-wise, over the next couple decades as productivity expectations rise exponentially.
And this is going to be the same in every knowledge work field. People will be using AI to orchestrate and supervise 20x the amount of work, and that's an incredibly demanding skill set.
>CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard.
I've heard this a decade ago as well (replace Ai agents with distributed cloud clusters). Instead it seems like industry wants to kick out all the expertise and outsource as much grunt work as possible to maintain what is already there. So I not too optimistic that the industry will be looking for proper architects. We're pushing more CRUD than ever under the guisd of cutting edge tech.
We're not working smarter, we're trying to work cheaper. We'd need a huge cultural shift to really show me that this won't be even more true on 10 years. That's why I'm slowly trying to pivot to a role not reliant on such industry practices
I don’t have an inkling of how to navigate. I don’t really see the problem.
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.
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