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Heather A OchmanNew Learning’s Updates
“The Knowledge”, and the Imminent Demise of Empirical Memory
“The Knowledge”, as it is called, is test of streets and locations given to London taxi drivers. Taxi rides in London are among the most expensive in the world, and a brain-science study has shown that the posterior hippocampus (the area of the brain considered an important for memory) is enlarged in London taxi drivers. Taxi costs and memory are now coming under assault from Uber and GPS. What’s the use of memory now? Why pay so much for taxis when ordinary, untested folks can get you there nicely? Now that we have all these cognitive prostheses—GPS, phones, smart watches—what’s the use of memory, and tests that focus on knowledge-as-memory? It’s an apocryphal story, told beautifully by Jody Rosen.
Jody Rosen: “The examination to become a London cabby is possibly the most difficult test in the world — demanding years of study to memorize the labyrinthine city’s 25,000 streets and any business or landmark on them. ... The six-mile radius from Charing Cross, the putative center-point of London marked by an equestrian statue of King Charles I, takes in some 25,000 streets. London cabbies need to know all of those streets, and how to drive them — the direction they run, which are one-way, which are dead ends, where to enter and exit traffic circles, and so on. But cabbies also need to know everything on the streets. Examiners may ask a would-be cabby to identify the location of any restaurant in London. Any pub, any shop, any landmark, no matter how small or obscure — all are fair game. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge. ...
“Forbes ran an editorial by staff writer John Tamny, extolling Uber as a “disrupter” of the taxi business and casting London’s cabbies as passé: “Just as automation, free trade and general economic progress have allowed us to shed previously important skills such as sewing, farming, and yes, addition/subtraction, so does it allow us — indeed, it requires us — to shed once-relevant knowledge. . . . As for London, the GPS has, much to the chagrin of some cabdrivers with telegraphic memory, rendered their knowledge of one of the world’s great cities largely irrelevant.”
“Taxi drivers counter such claims by pointing out that black cabs have triumphed in staged races against cars using GPS, or as the British call it, Sat-Nav. Cabbies contend that in dense and dynamic urban terrain like London’s, the brain of a cabby is a superior navigation tool — that Sat-Nav doesn’t know about the construction that has sprung up on Regent Street, and that a driver who is hailed in heavily-trafficked Piccadilly Circus doesn’t have time to enter an address and wait for his dashboard-mounted robot to tell him where to steer his car.
“Such arguments may hold for a while. But given the pace of technological refinement, how long will it be before the development of a Sat-Nav algorithm that works better than the most ingenious cabby, before a voice-activated GPS, or a driverless car, can zip a passenger from Piccadilly to Putney more efficiently than any Knowledge graduate? Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. To support the Knowledge is to make the unfashionable argument that expertise cannot be reduced to data, that there’s something dystopian, or at least depressing, about the outsourcing of humanity’s hard-won erudition to gizmos, even to portable handheld gizmos that themselves are miracles of human imagination and ingenuity. London’s taxi driver test enshrines knowledge as — to use the au courant term — an artisanal commodity, a thing that’s local and homespun, thriving ideally in the individual hippocampus, not the digital hivemind.”
Interesting comment, Ashley. I think it is possible, like you suggest, that Sat-Nav can allow a cab driver to have a more meaningful conversations with the guest because he/she isn't using valuable cognitive resources to keep the cab on the right path. I also think, however, that keeping the cab on the right path soon is second nature for those drivers who have passed the Knowledge test, barely using valuable conscious resources at all. In addition, the driver who passes the test will have the confidence he can get the guest to the proper destination and not perhaps have the worry in the back of his mind that his Sat-Nav could malfunction. I would then argue that a more confident person is more enjoyable to talk to than a anxious one.
In either case, I don't think it really matters. I think cab drivers (Knowledge or sat-navs) will be replaced by cars that drive themselves by 2025, which are smarter than humans. Then the question will be, would being driven around by a driverless car be enjoyable? Or would we prefer the company of a less competent human driver? Or could the driverless car have the personality of the Scarlett Johansson operating system in Her and provide us with the humanity aspect that we crave as well?
Regarding taxi driver profession many are no longer full time professionals. Very often we have to give direction where we want to go. Precariat made people engage in any activity they can.
Professional stability is relevant for that kind of memory training, I've heard or read somewhere that the restaurant/coffee shop employees were the ones with better memory training, but nowadays they have electronic devices to register the orders.
I reckon that technology is generating a lot of change in professions and some will just die as many other professions along the times have disappeared, due to new technologies (at present old, like telegraph, etc).
I’m a senior and I still remember when I was a kid of certain professions as the milkman, baker seller, newspaper street seller, shoeblack, fishmonger, street photographer, and so on. Many of these professionals would take the goods to the consumers’ homes. Nowadays, you can order them online, or have the big malls where you can buy almost anything.
It’s the drama of small business that has no capacity to compete with the big distribution.
However, new professions emerge with new technologies, we just have to adapt and reconvert.
When I started working in office, 30 years ago, we used typewriters. It took us a whole day to produce a few documents which today you produce in a computer in 5 minutes. I used the stencil to reproduce many copies of a document. Honestly, I wouldn’t like to work again with typewriters or stencils. I have no nostalgia for those days.
Clerical attendants to take documents from one floor to the other were common, but in a few years that career disappeared, as the telephone operator.
Does the Sat / Nav lead to human interactions that are less thoughtful and connected? Or does the Sat Nav allow our minds to forget that which is ultimately not that important? If we don't have to focus our limited neural resources on calling up routes and locations, does that leave more time for interactions that are more human between driver and passenger? Does it allow the taxi driver have room for other pursuits and passions to flourish in this now vacant space?
I think much of the argument has to do with self identification, self worth and our need to contribute to society. When our value as contributing members of society becomes replaced by algorithms and hardware, it is entirely natural to feel an attack on the very nature of our soul. This is a story that has been spun again and again for millenia. Where I live in Maine, it was the advent of home refrigeration units that largely brought to an end the ice houses and ice men of the 1800's. People who identified with a certain lifestyle, now found themselves redundant.
Historically speaking, many of these new technologies replaced activities that were more tactile in nature. The difference here is that now, our machines are beginning to replace the our cognitive contributions. I think that the psychological effects of this change cannot be underestimated. There are those that will starve and those that will thrive. Those who will thrive are those that have a capacity to adapt.
A deeper question is, do we have faith in where our collective innovations are bringing us?
While there is much conversation, there is no architect. There is no plan. There is only an uncharted river stretching before us. Hopefully we all have the capacity to read its signs and adjust our paddle accordingly.