I know people who are now total dependent on GPS to tell them how to get anywhere they have not been before. What this cartoon shows is not that unthinkable.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I know people who are now total dependent on GPS to tell them how to get anywhere they have not been before. What this cartoon shows is not that unthinkable.
Well, of course it’s not unthinkable. If it were, it would not be have been thought and a cartoon made..
Extremely stupid, unlikely, implausible, ridiculous, absurd… those, yeah. But not unthinkable.
Perish the thought.
(Also, SF has been there and done that: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power )
John Morales #1
weird flex, but OK
Sure. People that constantly interact with maps would be completely befuddled be these ancient artifacts called “street signs”, and how their content could be used to find your current position on a map is a lost science.
(Asking people is also not an option -- little-known fact, millennials killed asking in person a while ago).
Lol, yeah that’s pretty funny and actually how I feel when internet doesn’t work. Except about GPS, if you’ve downloaded your local map data onto your phone you don’t actually need cell service to use GPS mapping. In fact downloading map data from cell internet is horribly inefficient and expensive. With locally saved map data the GPS sattelites send their signals, all the phone does is listen and collect coordinates. I’ve used this in the middle of wilderness or on holiday in a foreign country without internet no problem.
GPS really is magic.
What =8)-DX said. Someone doesn’t know how phone GPSs work… or doesn’t know to cache maps, which was something I thought everyone had learned in about 2009.
If you think it’s bad now, it’s only getting worse. When I was a kid, I didn’t have any idea about the geography of my home town. I got in the car, I read a book, I got out of the car, and it was in a different place. Sometimes I got more reading done than others. I had no concept of distance or direction to my uncle’s house, my grandad’s workplace, the supermarket, the town centre. I effectively travelled by TARDIS, dematerialising from point A and arrive at point B with no view of/interest in the space in between.
Eventually I started getting about by bicycle and/or bus, and started to realise how places were connected. But until then, I just didn’t need to know.
I suspect my son may grow up in a similar state of ignorance of local geography, but it being 2019 already, he may never need to grow out of it. By the time he’s old enough to drive, he’ll probably just get in the car, speak his destination, and settled down with a Kindle. Such mental maps as he has will be time-based rather than distance- or direction-based -- he’ll know his cousins are an hour away while his best mate is only 10 minutes away… but he’ll have no reason to know the details of why.
One day a solar storm will totally disrupt the GPS system and most of the world will crash. I’ll fish out my ancient paper map collection and become the local wayfinding guide.
Another Morales comment, another eyeroll-muscle strain.
spoing