![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.axe-net.net\/ref\/gps\/garmin\/img\/gps-vente.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOn my last trip I needed to spend a day in Auckland. Although a New Zealander, I have not spent much time in Auckland working out driving routes as I’ve always relied on taxis. However this time I had a whole day of meetings all over town, and taxi fares were going to mount up fast.<\/p>\n
I decided to get a rental car with a GPS unit. It worked out to be a fraction of the cost of the combined taxi fares and guided me perfectly to the first four meetings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
However even as a technophile I found it to be very science fiction. The device would tell me – in a perfectly legible and very human voice – exactly when to turn, and how far away the turn was. When people asked me which route I took to their office, I honestly had no idea. That, in itself, I found unsettling.<\/p>\n
It reminded me of the Arthur C Clarke quote : <\/p>\n
Any sufficiently advanced technology
\nis indistinguishable from magic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut then things went horribly wrong. For my last – and most important meeting – the device could not find the address. Nor could it find the address of streets close by (I stashed a paper street map as a backup). A twenty minute journey morphed into a forty five minute nightmare as I struggled to navigate motorways with a street map on my lap, pulling off when I needed to re-check directions.<\/p>\n
It was a graphic demonstration of the state of cutting edge technology, especially when the cutting edge is so sharp it causes bleeding.<\/p>\n
From an outside observers view GPS is a mature technology adopted by manufacturers globally.<\/p>\n
From a users point of view GPS navigation devices can instantly transform themselves from the magic navigator into the most useless thing they ever laid eyes upon.<\/p>\n
In this respect it is similar to many technologies that are still being adopted by the majority of users, but which analysts and observers view as ‘old’.<\/p>\n
I too viewed GPS as an old technology – until I used it in anger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On my last trip I needed to spend a day in Auckland. Although a New Zealander, I have not spent much time in Auckland working out driving routes as I’ve always relied on taxis. However this time I had a whole day of meetings all over town, and taxi fares were going to mount up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emerging-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}