Death by GPS

In March, 2011, a Canadian couple drove towards Las Vegas using GPS for directions. They never got there. Instead, the man was found dead, and the woman barely alive. There’s a term for what had happened: “Death by GPS”. As Greg Milner explains in his book on GPS, Pinpoint:

“It describes what happens when your GPS fails you, not by being wrong, exactly, but often by being too right… it takes you down roads which barely exist, or were used at one time and abandoned, or are not suitable for your car…”

 

Of course, literal deaths by GPS are very rare. But reaching the wrong place is not very uncommon. Like the Japanese tourists who drove into the Australian ocean. Or the Belgian woman who ended up in Croatia. How can these things happen? Can’t people realize something is off as they stray farther and farther?

 

Well, when you’re driving through places you have no idea about, you have no sense of where you are anyway. And thus alertness is not really an option:

“GPS can lead to a sense of “disengagement”, because the question of location, which once required close interaction with the world, is now solved by unseen technologies far removed from the user.”

Besides, isn’t GPS “a technology that, in theory, makes it impossible to get lost”?

 

Long before GPS, a Bell Labs study evaluated how drivers use different navigational aids. One set was given a general map; the second was given a customized map that showed the route to take; the third was given verbal instructions on a tape (that could be rewound and paused); and the fourth used the tape and the customized map. Who did the best? The tape-only group. Huh? This sounds illogical: if the tape is good, surely tape plus customized map (the last option) should be even better, right? What’s going on?

 

Another cognitive study seemed to explain the results. It turns out that performing two cognitively similar tasks (e.g. both involving spatial orientation, like driving and looking at a map) is “much more difficult” than performing “two cognitively different tasks” (e.g. driving while listening to audio instructions on the tape). Aha…

 

And perhaps that’s why it all fits in: That “voice giving turn-by-turn GPS directions” while we drive requires us to do “two cognitively different tasks”, something aligns with what’s easy for our brains to handle.