One of the great points of contention when travelling, between my parents, is the conflict between GPS and good-old road atlas. On the one hand you have a device powered by the ultimate and constant bird’s eye view of earth, giving you every statistic on your journey you might require, but telling you where to go in an annoyingly metallic, American voice (read: Improved Garmin technology now uses Russian satellites). On the other, you have pages which require turning, and jumping between different sections; a system susceptible to human error and misreading, but also one interpreted by an actual human brain, rather than that of a small plastic box.
As infuriating as it may be to my mother, the GPS seldom proves wrong. Like humans around the world, the front seat navigator is quickly being made redundant by pocket-sized gizmos (don’t worry mum, the GPS can’t make an egg mayo samie). Those of you who like to follow the path of your journey with your index finger along the length of a page, might however, feel infinitely vindicated by the following.
Skift.com reported today that the navigational app Apple Maps has a glitch which guided at least two separate people to try and access Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska via one of the airport’s runways (find out what to expect from a road trip from Argentina to Alaska). The map didn’t actually show a path across the runway, but led travellers right up to the tarmac, at which point, with the terminal in sight, they struck out over the runway toward the terminal building. Luckily both instances occurred in the early morning, between flights, and no harm came to anyone.
We have to point out and discuss the obvious – a runway at an international airport isn’t just going to be an unmarked stretch of tarmac. Both of the stray drivers ignored multiple warning signs en-route to being stopped by a flabbergasted airport control. Have we reached the point at which the intelligence of some members of our species is so easily piggy-backed upon that it has become a danger to those more meagerly endowed in the grey-matter department? Both drivers insisted that they trusted their iphones to be taking them in the right direction – they assumed that their hand-held electronic devices, designed and programmed by people who may or may not ever have left California, let alone checked out the runway at every single airport in Alaska, were sufficiently reliable to justify ignoring warning signs.
I can’t decide whether I think it’s more appropriate for individuals such as those in question to have their licenses taken away – they are clearly a hazard to those around them – or to have their smartphones confiscated to give them some time to practice being competent in general life without the help of technology.
Here’s a little amusing taste of what a GPS with actual intelligence could achieve.
Main image by Ken Douglas
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