When i began driving i had an Ordnance Survey A-Z map in my glove box but relied pretty much completely on road signs and pulling up next to passers by and asking where such and such was but since Sat Navs became a major thing around the late 90's my navigation to strange and new places have been fully turning when the little voice in front of me tells me to until it informs me I am at my destination.
As child my memories were of parents pulling into a Motorway lay-by and unfolding a map on the bonnet and a discussion taking place while us kids sat in the back of the car and dropped sticky sweet wrappers on the floor and as an adult i still did the sweet wrapper thing but the A-Z never saw the light of day until recently when I took a look at it and noticed it was published in 1984 meaning hardly any of it was relevant now anyway.
I know that with the increase of technology, us humans are losing our skills and I use Sat Navs to get to the place I want to get to and then the Maps on my phone to hone in on the actual site and I know that without either, a dead battery or a GPS malfunction, I would get utterly and hopelessly lost immediately.
In 2020, neuroscientists based at McGill University in Montreal published research suggesting that found: 'People with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory and a decline in the Hippocampus' which is quite important because that's the part of the brain that deals with navigation.
Another report i vaguely remember (the memory part of the brain is increasingly getting foggier also) found that among London taxi drivers, the need to memorise so many geographical details was found to cause it to increase it's size so stands to reason that to not use it decreases it.
I have mentioned before the decline in students spelling and grammar and I fully blame spellcheck and the grammar checker on word processing applications and that only becomes noticeable when neither are available.
I am sure if I sit down and think about it harder I could come up with many more 21st Century problems where technology has erased the human processes we took for granted but whatever bit of my brain which works that out is obviously on the blip as all i can think about now is where can I charge my phone up as it's on 24% and i'm going out soon.
Sunday, 27 April 2025
21st Century Problems
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in the US, kids are no longer learning to write in script form. and learning basics like add, subtract, multiply and divide are skimmed over... don't even have to learn to use a calculator, just have to ask Siri to do the calculations for you.
and why should they learn that crap. if you are a computer programmer (they like to call themselves software engineers now - which is a joke because the typical IT person doesn't know much math) not using an LLM to write your base code then making a few final adjustments, you will soon be looking for a new job because LLMs can crank out code with 90% accuracy, but in seconds instead of days... so "software engineers" today better be using an LLM to bust some code, then make the minor corrections... if IT people are in trouble you can imagine what will happen to financial analysts, accountants, bookkeepers, clerks, etc.
IT and AI has the potential to eliminate all mundane tasks. But "mundane" varies by generation and culture.
humans 10,000 years ago were just as intelligent as humans today, and they likely retained as much knowledge as we retain today, it was just different knowledge.
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