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 fast.

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.

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.

It reminded me of the Arthur C Clarke quote :

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

But 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.

It was a graphic demonstration of the state of cutting edge technology, especially when the cutting edge is so sharp it causes bleeding.

From an outside observers view GPS is a mature technology adopted by manufacturers globally.

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.

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’.

I too viewed GPS as an old technology – until I used it in anger.