Use it or lose it

I'm continually amazed at the ways humans give their power away. Whether it is purchasing a new item of technology to remove a "burden" from our lives, or obeying a man in uniform, or making a piece of paper to send someone to make decisions on our behalf, even in small ways, it represents a rejection of our ability to provide for ourselves. It's almost as if history never happened.

Take for example our cars. Obviously they make us reliant on fossil fuels to move around and permit us to live far away from the places that we are required to frequent (work, school, family).

One observation I've made twice in the past week is that a new "innovation" is again making us less powerful. I'm sure you've seen or have purchased a GPS travel adviser for your car. These things can be programmed with an origin and destination and tell you where to turn and when using maps of the world. On the surface these are positive devices as they help us to reach our destinations by avoiding us fumbling with maps and getting lost.

But you have to ask the questions: what did people do before such GPS systems? Were we always lost? Was it more dangerous on the roads?

Of course people had, and continue to have, the capacity to look after themselves. If they had to go somewhere they could easily plan a route and execute it. I like to make lists which I can quickly glance at to make sure that I'm on the right track. Often we're not traveling alone on unfamiliar routes so a passenger can read a map safely.

Why are we paying to lose our abilities to navigate?

Now you probably think that this is unimportant but much like children who are driven to school I wonder if this new technology will affect our ability to conceptualize space. It's a fact that children who walk or take the bus to school versus those who are driven to school can conceptualize an internal map of their neighbourhoods and solve problems more readily than their powerless peers.

Imagine, you are born, go to school in a vehicle driven by your parents. When you are old enough your parents buy you a car, outfitted with a GPS system. Then you go to university and get a job after graduation that requires you to work 75 km away from your home using a GPS system. Naturally you would have done some walking to your destinations throughout your life but overall you would not have much experience on the ground learning routes and patterns.

Humans are mobile animals. We move around to different places and learn things by observation. Driving zombie-like along a hypnotic highway listening to orders from a small machine is not a fitting pinnacle of human achievement. We can definitely do better and take our power back.

And let's not forget that the GPS system is a product of the US military. I wonder if a portion of the proceed of the purchases of these devices goes to the US military?