GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost

The article opens with an anecdote about Shachar Maidenbaum, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University, who was driving north in Israel when his GPS navigation app, Waze, told him to turn left and drive roughly two hundred miles south. He realized his phone thought he was in Beirut, a result of Israel's military practice of GPS 'spoofing,' which sends fake location data to GPS-enabled devices. Some pilots and ship captains in the region have had to disable automated safety systems because of this.

Maidenbaum, who studies spatial navigation using virtual-reality experiments, then faced his own navigational challenge when visiting a friend who had moved. He drove to the center of the correct town, found the train tracks near the old address, and used the friend's description of the move to locate the new house. The experience heightened his concern about society's heavy reliance on GPS, and he asked, 'What happens when it goes away?'

The piece traces GPS's history: developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1970s, first used in bombs during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and opened to full civilian use in 2000. Within a decade, there were a billion GPS receivers worldwide, most of them civilian. Katherine Dunn, author of 'Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World,' describes this as 'like we're all using bazookas to order delivery.'

The article also explains the mechanics of satellite navigation via trilateration, where a receiver calculates its position from signals of at least four satellites, and notes that the U.S. system has been joined by similar networks from the European Union, Russia, and China. It closes by reflecting that for centuries, getting lost was a major preoccupation that could prove life-changing, a perspective now lost in the age of always-on GPS.