Technological Dependence

Many people, myself included, have grown too comfortable with the conveniences of modern technology. When was the last time you went on a road trip without reliance on realtime GPS? I recently did, and it was eye opening.

The other day, I had to do some traveling and did not know the route beforehand. In the past, I would have not worried about that and just relied on realtime driving directions from my iPhone. This time, however, I couldn't do that because the GPS on the Librem 5, while functional, is not as user-friendly as on iOS; you need to have the phone unlocked and be watching it in order to use the GPS, as compared to iOS's lock screen and voice integration. Obviously I could not do this while driving, so I needed to figure something else out. I decided to look at the directions ahead of time, save a local PDF copy of the turn-by-turn directions and map, and memorize some general waypoints.

Nevertheless, I was convinced I'd just get lost and would have to find a temporary parking spot throughout the trip just so I could check the GPS. Instead, the opposite happened. Knowing that I could not rely on live turn-by-turn directions, spoken through my phone with no interaction, I found myself actually paying attention to where I was: street names, waypoints, city names, cardinal directions, city block numbers, etc. At the end of the first leg of the trip, I realized that I was at the wrong address on the wrong side of town, but once I found out the actual address I needed, *I didn't even need directions or a map*. This was in a city with which I am not familiar, yet I had no trouble finding my way around. As someone who is normally terrible with directions and desperately relies on GPS, I was quite impressed with myself. I even found my way back home without any further GPS directions at all, but just mentally referenced the waypoints that I had memorized.

So it turns out that it's not that I am terrible with navigation, I have just been dumbed down by reliance on omnipresent GPS. I can guarantee you that I am not the only one in this situation. What happens if the grid goes down or the GPS satellites hiccup, even temporarily? People would be hopelessly lost. Extrapolating from this a broader theme of technological reliance, I can't help but fear that other aspects of technology would make society helpless if something were to happen to it, especially given the global geopolitical tension and instability. Would most people be able to handle basic arithmetic or algebra without the help of technology?