> Imho, one of the most corrosive aspects of GPS has been mystifying navigation, due to over reliance on weird street connections. Versus the conceptually simply (if slightly longer) routes we used to take.

This, exactly!

Many years ago I realized constant GPS use meant I had no idea how to get around the city I'd lived in for years, and had huge gaps in my knowledge of how it fit together.

To fix that, I:

1) ditched the GPS,

2) started using Google Maps printouts where I manually simplified its routes to maximize use of arterial roads, and

3) bought a city map as a backup in case I got lost (this was pre-smartphone).

It actually worked, and I finally learned how to get around.

In the early 2000s, I had developed via trial-and-error a very convoluted typical route home, cutting through some neighborhoods to bypass interchanges that were typically heavily backed-up during the evening rush hour. It would shave 10 minutes minimum, and sometimes 15-20.

Shortly after 2010, that route became much less useful [due to heavily increased traffic] and when a colleague told me that I should try Waze, I realized that Waze was now sending a bunch of traffic down "my" route home.

*Fortunately* (for manual street navigators), people who only use GPS think the art of manual street navigation is impossibly complex. During heavy traffic, we can use maps to find out where those people are being herded, and manually navigate even more efficiently. Also: it's nice to know if there's an accident somewhere.

I find Apple maps is very good in this regard and will keep you on the highway even if the traffic is higher and the route longer, because usually over average it's faster.

I see a lot of people exiting when they see traffic come on and I can't help but shake my head. We've all tried it before, and it almost never works.

The value of Apple maps to me is if there's HUGE traffic - like an accident closing 3 lanes. Often there's no indication of this otherwise, and you can be stuck for a whole nother hour. But Maps knows, and it'll put you on a longer highway to get away from it.

I no longer use apple maps in my daily commute (1.5 hours one way). But, when I did, it caught quite a few huge accidents. Now I leave the office earlier and the likelihood of accidents is much lower, so I don't need Maps. Even so, once in a blue moon I'll be in a sticky situation.

It also has information on store closing times/dates (some stores are closed on random days of the week, or close early on others), unexpected detours (construction, previously announced road work), speed traps (crowdsourced), and more.

Some of it simply wasn't possible before the technology came along.

> True, although "back in the day" people used to memorize at what times during the day certain routes were busy, and they took alternative routes ("the back roads" in my area) to get around traffic that could be predicted.

I think "memorize" has the wrong connotation of rote memorization, like you were memorizing data from a table. I think it was more like being observant and learning from that.

> We've outsourced that to an app, too.

The technology lets you turn off your brain so it can atrophy.

In a big enough city that information is too dynamic to memorize. Car crashes, road work, sports events, presidential visits all caused their own microclimate that was not part of the everyday rush hour.

That's correct. The whole thing is being promoted in a deliberately misleading way by multiple groups to get clicks.

> Is it more or less rational to assume that we have some special intangible spark?

My comment is predicated on the belief that yes, at this moment it is more rational to assume we have a special spark. Moreso, it’s irrational that individuals believe that in these models there’s a uniqueness beyond a few emergent properties. It’s a critique on the individuals, not the systems. I worry many of us are a few Altman statements short of having a Blake Lemoine break.

To look at our statistical models and say they exhibit “actual intelligence” concerns me that individuals are losing groundness with what we have in front of us.

Now you’re being remarkably reductive—-about the human language facility. We don’t ”go one word at a time.” (Simple example: “hey, look at that tig boad! Uh… ha! Tig boad, I meant big toad.” Stupid example but the point is that the cognitive psychology of language is much more complex that you’re making out.)

Also, what are these “thoughts” you have when writing and what’s a “complete” vs. “semi-complete” one? Stupid question, yes, but you again vastly over-trivialize the real dynamic interplay between figuring out what word(s) to write and figuring out what precisely you’re actually trying to say at all. Writing really is another form of thinking for us.

If neither an AI nor a person does anything but fit the next word by matching with other prior texts, then where did those other texts come from?

A language is a vocabulary and a set of rules which can be described and codified, and is generally learned from others and other prior examples.

But all that describes is a tool called a language. The tool itself is mechanistic. The wielder may or may not be. The tool and the wielder are two different things.

A piece of paper with text on it is not a writer. A machine that writes text onto paper is still not a writer even though a human writer performs the same physical part of the process as the machine.

Similarly, just like it's possible for an mp3 player to make the same sounds we use to express concepts and convey understanding, without itself having any concepts or understanding, it is also possible for an intellect to perform mechanistic acts that don't require an intellect.

Sure, actually quite a lot of human activity can be described by simple rules that a machine can replicate. So what?

You can move a brick from one place to another. And so can a cart. And so can gravity. Therefor you are no different from a field?

It's utterly silly to be mystified by this. It's challenging the other ape in mirror for looking at you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaMylwohL14&t=23s

I think you are confusing intelligence with consciousness. They're orthogonal.

Otherwise I do not know what definition of intelligence you are using. For me I just use wiki's: "Intelligence can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context."

Nothing in that definition disallows a system from being "pure mechanism" and also being intelligent. An mp3 player isn't intelligent because - unlike AI - it isn't taking in information to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

An mp3 player that learns my preferences over time and knows exactly when to say hi and how based on contextual cues is displaying intelligence. But I would be mistaken for thinking that it doing so means it is also conscious.