You’ve happened to stumble upon a very, very old argument between one of my closest friends and I. As I had mentioned in the post, I have been using GPS receivers since the mid ’90s and have–pardon the pun–never looked back. GPS has certainly changed the way I navigate, both on the road and in the air.

What keeps my friend up at night regarding GPS receivers is that he is totally convinced that if one dares to use a GPS receiver for road navigation, they’ll immediately turn their common sense off and drive off an incomplete highway overpass because the GPS told them to. It is my assertion that while you’ll get the odd individual who will do just that, on the whole GPS users use their devices responsibly, and their natural common sense will keep them from driving straight through the Wal-Mart where the road used to be.

And rest assured, my friend will find the news articles about the one-in-a-million times when GPS usage went totally awry–and then blog it. It reminds me of people who don’t wear their seat belts because they might crash into a large body of water (lake, canal, etc). The odds of doing so: Roughly 150 to 1. You’re really going to bet your butt on 150:1 odds? Heh–go to Vegas. They’ll love you there.

Prior to GPS aided navigation systems and online wayfinding apps like Google Maps, finding your way around hadn’t changed significantly since the invention of the printing press. And before that, it hadn’t changed much in the prior 2000 years. People found their way around using paper maps combined with location awareness (i.e., how to figure out what spot on the map corresponds to where you happen to be).

GPS Nav systems do a pretty damned good job of figuring out where you are. They also do a pretty decent job of telling you how to get around. But these systems are extremely new in the scope of maps. They will improve significantly.

Specifically, a major improvement will be online database connectivity. We already get this in things like VZNavigator and the new Google Android Nav app. The maps in these navigation systems are linked to live databases that can tell you about things like traffic. Eventually, they’ll be able to route you around bad neighborhoods (actually, DC had something like that as a winner in the Apps for Democracy contest: http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/dc-crime-finder/).

We are at a crossroads where one set of skills will be supplanted with another. Like being able to bridle a horse to carriage, being proficient with a paper map will be less necessary. That said, it does still require a modicum of common sense. Utilizing a glass cockpit in a light aircraft won’t prevent you from flying into a thunderhead – but it saves you the cognitive load of dealing with sectionals while flying.

I would have less of an issue with GPS if I didn’t feel like people just toss common sense out the window when using them. Yes, you got us from Deepest Darkest Florida to our hotel room via GPS, but damn if it didn’t take us a very circuitous (if not very dark, and deer prone) route. A GPS does you no good if you need to get from Anaheim to El Segundo and it has you going through Compton.