Ask Lemmy

I memorized my friend's phone number. It's because she's a lawyer, and that seems like a good number to have memorized.

The way it’s going…

AI: Happy Birthday! Other notable people who share your birthday: Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Charlie Kirk, and many more great historical figures you should hope to praise!

Stored phone numbers and GPS sre reliable though. I never remembered most numbers or birthdays anyway due to ADHD, so those being easily accessible was a benefit.

GPS directions also include construction and more accurate time estimates. I never learned alternate routes because remembering the ones I knew was enough effort and I still learn those. Going to new cities is way easier now!

Spell check is one of those.
Writing our own letters. That was actually a skill

How to be human

That’s entirely up to you. Do you not have phone numbers for your main people memorized? I also have my library card memorized. This level of memory work isn’t rocket scientist level functioning, it’s a choice.

Do you really want to be in a hospital, after a car accident, with no phone (destroyed/lost in crash), and have no idea how to call your parent, spouse, or child? This occurs more often than you’d think.

I continue to remember phone numbers and birthdays. No Google or Facebook for me and I'm waiting for the AI bubble to pop.

Edit: GPS, I thought you meant Google play services. I do use an offline map on my phone if I'm going to an unfamiliar area but I have no problem reading a map.

This is /possibly/ part of a long term trend of decreasing human reliance on brainpower.

Brain size doesn't neatly correlate to intelligence, but it's still kind of used as a proxy, over human evolution. It gets bigger for a long time, then starts getting smaller again, starting maybe 20k-3k years ago.

This has been attributed to group size, agriculture, writing or statistical error. So maybe it's not a thing.

I still remember my childhood home phone number, but I don't need to memorise any phone number anymore. I still have them archived for everyone I care to know in a cloud synced joplin file. That also includes birthdays. I can barely remember my own let alone other peoples.

GPS I'd be fucked without. Aphantasia and a horrible sense of direction. I'm glad I missed the paper map era. I only know the routes I have driven multiple times, so a large portion of the core city and satellite towns.

I don't use Facebook at all. Deleted that shit in 2014.

Don't use AI very often outside of questions where a traditional web search isn't or is no longer viable due to enshittification and gameified results. Begrudgingly, and I check the sources. No trusting a sanitized corporate sycophant bot. But it's not like those traditional web searches weren't buried in misinfo, disinfo, or AI spam articles either. People seem to willfully not acknowledge that.

Edit: I also read paper books and go to my local library.

Except for those that are closest to us, we never would have remembered any of those things anyway; all of it would have been written down in an address book. Now the address book is digital, and is part of an LLM for some reason (selling your data).

In the year 2525

I still memorize phone numbers and directions.

In fact, I’ve increased the amount of things I memorize. In addition to the massive amount of usernames and passwords I have to keep in mind, I have credit card and bank routing and account numbers memorized so I can enter payment information on the fly.