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 ...