Losing Skills
36 points by isuffix
36 points by isuffix
Without disagreeing that it's good to deliberately maintain driving skills, it's worth noting that LKA (Lane Keeping Assist) seems to reduce crashes on the order of one in five.
Cars are such dangerous creatures that we need both our wits and our automated tools to mitigate their evil.
(Author) Thanks for this, that's really interesting. Maybe in the future when every car I drive has the feature, I'll use it. For now, it's hard to adapt back and forth, so I have to make the best decision for myself, but i'll keep this in mind next time I drive the van.
I wrote about something very similar in Your Brain on GPS... although with that comparison I wonder how many people would say it's a loss.
I think learning that skill is really hard outside of areas you travel frequently. In my neighborhood I like to run in random areas to learn it better. I’d say it’s made my sense of direction really good whereas my partner can barely get home without their phone.
A long time ago (back when in-car GPS-assisted navigation was a $3000 option and not commonly available), when I moved to a new place, I would deliberately reserve some time to drive around and be lost. I'd give myself places to drive, but not have a particular time I needed to be at those places. I had a street atlas. I'd pull over and look at it as needed. Once I got there, I'd just walk or jog around the neighborhood to see what was where. When I moved to the Boston area, I'd guess that I spent 60-80 hours semi-intentionally "lost" in the first few months I was there, with the conscious goal of learning my way around.
My then-new partner, who moved to the area to join me a few months after I moved there, thought that my sense of direction was insanely good. She didn't understand (and still doesn't really, all these years later) that it was a deliberately developed skill and not some kind of innate ability I have.
(I did the same thing when I moved to the part of the world where I now live, even though GPS was definitely a common thing by then.)
I'm in the same boat, another Toyota/Lexus driver here. Fortunately, I still drive my older cars— without lane assistance— often enough that I've not lost the skill of, erm, conscientious driving. However, when I drove mostly only my newer car (with lane assistance) for a few months over the winter, I definitely noticed some reliance on its less-mind features and had to relearn.
I wonder about a time when lane assistance or FSD is so common that we'll normalize them, and be unable to operate without them, out of lack of skill or a legal framework that prohibits it.
I can't drive a manual transmission car. I never had a car with a manual transmission, although I've had friends swear by them. My current car has automatic headlights. I don't recall a time when I've had to manually turn them on (and I can if I need to). When I drive my girlfriend's car, I have to remember to turn on the headlights, and turn them off (at least the car chimes when I shut off the car without turning out the headlights). My car also automatically locks the doors when I shift out of park, and automatically unlocks them when I shift into park. This is something I've had to learn when picking people up (shift into park, or hit the unlock button on the door). I also have lane assistance, but I turned that into a game---how long can I keep from triggering it? My girlfriend hates driving my car because of all these affordances. I've grown used to them. Then again, I'm not a fan of driving. It's not like I hate driving; I just don't love driving.
On the other hand, I refuse to use LLMs for programming, because I love the craft of programming. I refuse to use LLMs for anything because I respect the craft of others (artists, musicians, writers, etc.).
On the gripping hand, I have a friend who hates LLMs for technical work, yet will gladly use them for artistic work.
This is the case for a lot of technologies. We’d probably be more proficient at mental math without the calculator, navigation without gps, locomotion without cars, memorization without note-taking, etc. Collectively, unconsciously, and over time we adopted technologies which gave us superhuman ability in some domain, in the process atrophying our natural abilities. In some cases it might be viewed as a Faustian bargain.
I am not disagreeing with you, but just to say that another way to view it is “extended mind” (Andy Clark).
Yes! Clark explores this in The Experience Machine — that our minds are not limited to our physical brains. We extend our minds through an array of tools; these tools effectively become part of our minds. He highlights that people feel real distress when they lose access to such tools, because in a practical sense they’re losing part of their mind’s ability.
It’s not surprising that with a tool as fundamental and powerful as an LLM, which approximates basic reasoning ability, that mind extension feels fraught. Like we might be outsourcing a core competency.