Well, my memory is good enough to remember that in the pre-Google world I had no way to find out reviews of restaurants in a city I was visiting, let alone 'memorize' them.

Travel guides have been a thing for a very long time

But that's just another memory surrogate...

It's commonly quoted (probably inaccurately) that Einstein never bothered remembering his home phone number because it could easily be looked up in a phone book. The brain very regularly expands outside itself to think or remember, almost like subcontracting.

Smartphones have just made them a one-stop shop for all our external thinking now.

This reminds me uncomfortably of someone I saw yesterday arguing that you shouldn't get a flu shot because it makes your immune system lazy.

Memory is complicated and difficult. It can be trained, but we only have so much bandwidth for it. It's very nice to have automation to "remember" for us, so we can stop wasting that limited bandwidth on things that don't much matter, like details of our dinner experience, and save medium-term memory for more important stuff.

I can't get in the details because I'm no neurologist but there are a lot of news stories out there about how taxi drivers end up with a great memories from having to remember all the routes. There are also stories about how taxi drivers using GPS don't have all those memory improvements. I agree that news stories are not the best source of accurate scientific information so take it with a grain of salt.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...

http://www.thedrive.com/news/8686/study-using-gps-navigation...

> there are a lot of news stories out there about how taxi drivers end up with a great memories from having to remember all the routes

The question is, does that do them any good? It might help them in the rare case there's a problem with navigation data, but 99% of the time it's a wasted effort, and personally, I purposefully prefer taxis/transport services that use navigation.

My own opinion is that we should treat brain-memory as cache memory: store the things that are directly relevant to the important parts of our lives, to make ourselves better in those areas; otherwise, don't bother memorizing.

>The question is, does that do them any good? It might help them in the rare case there's a problem with navigation data, but 99% of the time it's a wasted effort

Yes, very much so. The road layout in London is absolutely insane, because the city was established in AD 43. Finding efficient routes requires a great deal of local knowledge and contextual understanding.

Black cab drivers are extremely good at minimaxing journey time. If they have a choice between a route that always takes 30 minutes or a route that sometimes takes 25 minutes and sometimes takes an hour, they'll usually choose the former.

They're required to memorise both routes and landmarks, so they're phenomenally good at fuzzy matching for destinations. If you ask to go to "that place where all the goths and weirdos hang out", they'll take you straight to Camden Lock. They have an uncanny knack for getting confused tourists back to their hotel, based on the scantest of descriptions in the most broken of English.

Uber has a role to play in London, but it's undoubtedly an inferior option. Black cab drivers are a part of the fabric of London and it'd be a tragedy if they were pushed out of business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-eyqWHNPs

When I lived in London I once read a text from my wife to a black cab driver with instructions of where I was supposed to meet her for dinner.

Even though I didn't have the correct name of the street (and didn't have the name of the restaurant at all!), the driver got the right street and the right restaurant. (The street had probably 10+ restaurants on it.) I was astonished, and have never forgotten it.

Here in Sydney, Australia, the taxi drivers are generally hopeless and in many cases can hardly manage basic English, let alone navigate properly.

That's why I understand Uber has become popular but not all of my experiences with Uber have been so crash hot either.

> The question is, does that do them any good?

Anecdotally, I used to have a phone with a really bad battery that I couldn’t be bothered to replace, so I was constantly running out of charge. I started training myself to look up directions on google maps, then memorize the next 5-10 direction steps and compete with myself to make it to my destination with the fewest number of map checks.

I continue to do that, because it’s done a few things for me:

- it’s fun and I get personal gratification out of my improved sense of direction and orientation - driving/riding is much more engaging because I’m paying attention to my surroundings (looking for visual queues for my location) instead of just putting on music and turning on mental cruise control - I travel a lot and feel a lot safer when I have a mental backup of where I am, in case I run out of data or if I lose signal, which happens from time to time - I feel less attached to and reliant on my phone

To your point, it’s something I decided is worth my time and effort, if even just for the entertainment.

Depends on what you're memorizing, too. You can be good at remembering some things, but not others. Lots of fields have specialized training exercises for memorization - consider how you learn vocabulary in a new language, for example.

This can get tied to "muscle memory" as well. I'm currently going through a lot of this on guitar - two note per string pull-off exercises, in the interest of learning Eric Johnson style picking techniques. Much of the core of his playing is based on two notes per string, first the high note and then the low note. So deep muscle memory of that particular move helps me do other, larger things.

> things that don't much matter, like details of our dinner experience

Really???

Can you remember details of what you ate for dinner two weeks ago? Probably not. That's because it's not very important.

On the other hand, I can remember one meal I ate several years ago in great detail, because it had three of the best dishes of their type I've ever had (sashimi, pasta, and ice cream in one meal!). That meal mattered. But I'd have a hard time telling you what I ate last thursday.

Or maybe these services provide us augmented cognitive abilities beyond that of a disconnected human.

That is indeed the point of technology.

Personally, my only gripe is that those technologies tend to heavily depend on cloud and SaaS, which make you a slave of the whims of a third party, that is unreliable and often doesn't have your best interest in mind. Those same tools could be equally empowering without that dependency.

Sure. I'm all for the transhumanist aspect of this, letting the machines take care of everything they can so I can focus my intellect on the things that machines can't do, and I'll admit that (for example) I lean hard on Google when choosing whether to memorize a particular piece of information or to simply know that it exists and how it can be found. In this case, though, my parents figured out that I had an issue around the time I learned to read but I myself only recently realized I could talk to my doctor about it. There's a reason I choose to describe these systems as prostheses. And even if I do have a ton of practice exercising conscious control over my memory, I'd still really prefer to be spending those cognitive resources on things that aren't basic everyday tasks.

> There's a reason I choose to describe these systems as prostheses.

I choose to describe them as "external brain" ("exobrain" is the term of the art now?) - "prosthesis" feels like it implies there's something wrong with it, and that you use it only because you have no other choice.

On the one hand, that's how I feel about literally everything about myself. There is something wrong with my entire body. I do only use it because I have no better choice. To quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, "I'm sure Einstein was very smart for a human. I'm sure a General Systems Vehicle would think that was very cute of him." Like I said, I'm all aboard the transhumanism train.

On the other hand, you're right that most people don't have that intuition and that "prosthesis" may not be effective communication. This particular issue disadvantages me compared to other humans and solutions to it help me recover basic functionality, but you're right that this technology is good enough that a run-of-the-mill human can benefit from it too. They just don't benefit as much as I do. So, hm, maybe I should switch to augmentative language over assistive. I'll think about it.

I'm sorry, I didn't notice until you clarified that you suffer from actual memory issues; I assumed you were just using hyperbole as a rhetorical device. With the context clear, I see why you would want to refer to those tools as prostheses, given that they lift you to (and hopefully above) the "normal" values. And as you say, they indeed perform both augmentative and assistive functions.

Not a problem. You didn't dismiss it as "easily distracted" or try to condemn me for some kind of moral failure, which puts you ahead of quite a few of the users in this thread.