# gps: gps makes us lazy

the global positioning system is a marvel of human engineering, no doubt at that. however i really wish it would not exist. my personal beef with the gps is sucks the fun out of the exploration. i owned a smartphone for about a year before i threw it away so i do have some experience with gps and navigation. in those days whenever i wanted to go to any place, i just simply put in the destination into the device and then followed the path it devised. rather than looking up and learning about my environment, i was looking down to my phone, following the arrow and only looked up occasionally to check which street i have to turn onto. basically i felt that my phone reduced me to a mindless drone. i was completely fine before the gps, never felt that i was missing it but after the phone ditch event i felt some withdrawal effect from it. i was even a bit afraid to venture outside just because i might get lost. however i feel much happier without it. whenever i want to go to a place i have not been yet, i have to plan ahead. i have to study the map. i have to learn about large landmarks that can guide my path. i can perhaps walk through the path virtually through a street view application. i even draw myself a minimap just in case i do not remember all the details. then i can execute the journey. during the journey i am very attentive to my environment. i am sort of in the csíkszentmihályi like flow where my mind is quietly alert and focused on one thing. i am also very confident because i know what i expect at every corner. and when i successfully get to my journey i am quite happy that i planned well and managed to execute that plan successfully. or maybe i feel happy because of the flow state i was in for long time. so having no gps, makes my life more fun.

okay so i do not need gps but then why do i say it should not even exist? my problem is that i do know that it is very easy to get hooked on it. once hooked it is very hard to imagine life without it. people will forget that there are others who do not have access to gps devices. they will not learn to give directions in an effective way. they will not create landmarks that simplify navigation. so my problem is that if society gets overly dependent on gps then that society will be harder to navigate through without the gps because there will be no intrinsic motivation to make it simple. basically it will make the towns and other places less accessible.

it even ruins videogames. when i play an open world game, it usually has some sort of waypoint system so i am just reduced to mindlessly following the waypoint there too. i do not even look at all the nice scenes the game artists created for me to enjoy. there is no exploration required. sure, i could turn off the navigation system but then the game becomes unplayable because the quests in the game do not fully explain the destination and often there is no good way to look up a route to the destination and then following that route without constantly checking the minimap if i am at the place i am supposed to be or not. this is the effect i was talking about: if people assume that gps exists, they will not make the place accessible for non-gps users.

what i would really wish instead that we would make navigating the world so simple that a gps is just not needed. suppose a city is organized into a grid of roads and all the roads are just numbered sequentially. such city would be boring. but navigating would be super simple because you only need two numbers to specify a location in it. you can get to that location from any given location without a map. we should have more like that. so whenever you are coming up with organization scheme for physical space, try to come up with a way that does not require navigation tools. make it boring. boring structures make me happy. please make me happy.

and the other problem with universal gps access is the privacy violations it leads to. large organizations or family might want to know where each member is at any given moment which usually does not lead to trusting relationships. it is a silly idea at this point but as technology proliferates it might become more and more accepted. i might only want to track track my children at first for their own "safety". when i fully make terms with that arrangement, i start thinking of tracking a spouse for their "safety". then when i get terms with that arrangement, i might want start tracking more and more family members and so they want track me in exchange. now everybody is tracking everybody's movements. then when governments want to track me for my own own "safety", i might not be objecting to it because it is now "normal" to track people. the situation is horrible at this point. the whole thing escalates in baby steps. it is better to stop the whole thing in its roots and just live in a way that does not require the knowledge of one's position on this planet.

published on 2017-12-09

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