Jun

18

GPS Will Turn Us All Into Idiots

June 18, 2008 |

image According to a bunch of so called experts interviewed by ABC News, using a GPS will make you dumb and will herald the end of human communication (or at least our ability to ask for and give directions):

“There is a social function of being lost,” Slavin said. “And that social function of being lost will itself be lost. Think about how many times in the last month or so you have asked somebody for directions, or somebody has asked you for directions. That bit of social communication, in which a stranger and native meet at some point, will slowly ebb away. The question is: Will we feel ourselves to be natives everywhere, or to be strangers everywhere?”

But soon, people may not need to have any sense of direction whatsoever. The GPS on the iPhone allows a person to search for a type of place, such as a Chinese restaurant, eliminating search time for places people don’t yet know exist, but also ending that human impulse to explore.

These arguments are so ludicrous, they are almost not worth discussing, but they are also part of a historical pattern:  maps made us lose our internal compass; spell checkers were supposed to ruin our ability to write; the typewriter ruined our ability to write; the book ruined our ability to memorize and so on…

Sure, we all used to be able to memorize phone numbers better than before we had cell-phones – but we also had a lot fewer numbers to remember.

Unless you have a strange fetish for wasting time on getting lost, a GPS is a god-send (and besides – how many people do you know who have a horrible sense of direction already?).

Are we going to lose our “human impulse to explore”? Of course not – it just means we get to the places we want to explore quicker!


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