Unintended Consequences of Technology

When I was a teenager and into my early 20s, I had a large spiral bound map book in the back pocket of the driver's seat in my car. I didn't have to use it often though. The rare trip to a new location was just a few turns beyond some other location I knew well. My "mental map" was adequate to get me almost all the way there before I had to make use of some verbal instructions that might have referenced a gas station, post office or some other easily recognizable landmark.

And then 2008 happened. February 5, more specifically.

I worked at Bloomberg at the time. A co-worker and I left work a little early and made the short walk over to the 5th Avenue Apple Store where we waited in line with a thousand other people (literally), to buy the newly launched iPhone. It wasn't until a couple years later that an iPhone had an integrated GPS. The original iPhone could use cell phone tower triangulation to generally locate you, which was really helpful relative to my paper map. I still had to do the work of understanding my precise location and orientation though.

And then turn-by-turn directions happened.

Backing up for a moment, I remember back in the early 2000s, I had my giant, black, plastic Dell laptop, an external GPS receiver of some sort (probably a Garmin). The GPS was attached to my laptop with a serial cable (maybe USB?). I wrote some code to parse the per-second data from the GPS. I used some map data (from the US Census Bureau?) and a lot of Java code (from me) to draw a road and political boundary map of the US, and I put all of this on the passenger seat of my car while I drove cross-country. I still remember trying to figure out the notion of scaling the vector line data as I was just getting the drawing code to work. Anyway. I didn't actually implement turn-by-turn directions, but it was amazing being able to see my up-to-the-second precise location on a map.

Fast forward to today, and I have the most simplistic "mental map" that I've ever had. When blindly following turn-by-turn directions I occasionally wonder, "if GPS suddenly failed, how long would it take me to find my way home?" It is an incredible amount of trust and perhaps a lot of indifference borne of laziness. It is about as far from "prepper" as you can get: I don't even know how to get home sometimes.

GPS is amazing, life-changing technology. Digital mapping and turn-by-turn directions appreciably improve quality of life in countless ways. What are the unintended consequences though? In what non-obvious ways has my mental acuity suffered as a result of no longer needing to understand maps and directions?

The point being...

If AI is reading and writing your emails, making your decisions, solving your problems, choosing your entertainment and doing your work – what unintended consequences will you face? It is turn-by-turn directions on a much larger scale.