WARNING: GPS May Be Altering YOUR Brain!

WARNING: GPS May Be Altering YOUR Brain!

Just about everyone now uses GPS when driving. All our smart phones have GPS chips in them as well. Did you know there are 24 GPS satellites circling the planet? In fact, they say we rely on GPS so much anymore, it may be stunting our brains. That wouldn’t take much. Just sayin’. We use it to guide us in traveling constantly now. We also use it to track sex offenders and others. It has many science applications. Dating services use it as well as Uber. It has become a concrete part of our lives. Just imagine if we had to live without it. You can thank the US Air Force for the technology. The military had first dibs on it, but then companies such as Garmin and Magellan got a hold of it. Now, most cars have a device on their dash that drivers almost could not do without anymore. How things have changed… I almost long for physical maps again.

GPS

From Bloomberg:

In Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, Greg Milner tells two stories. One’s about how the Global Positioning System became one of the 21st century’s most important technologies. The other’s about how it may be stunting the brains of the ingenious species that created it.

We use GPS today to guide airplanes, ships, and tractors. It keeps tabs on sex offenders and helps find oil deposits. “GPS surveys land, and builds bridges and tunnels,” Milner writes. “GPS knows when the earth deforms; it senses the movement of tectonic plates down to less than a millimeter.” GPS can tell you how long until your Uber arrives—and even let you know if someone nearby is interested in a one-night stand.

The set of technological challenges that had to be solved to enable all of this was formidable. There were cultural stumbling blocks, too. The U.S. Air Force birthed the system, but the brass starved it of funds because it didn’t see the need for another navigation tool. Once GPS’s value became clear, the Pentagon tried to keep the most accurate version for itself, degrading the civilian signal so it was less precise. The first commercial GPS companies focused on designing devices to the exacting standards of the military. Magellan, and especially Garmin, came to dominate the market, making billionaires of their founders, by selling cheaper devices whose diminished accuracy was perfectly satisfactory for people not launching missiles. (Private-sector engineers eventually found ways around so-called selective availability, and the military’s jamming was abandoned.)

We can now be easily tracked and located. Big Brother has become the ultimate reality and instead of being horrified (as we should be), Americans shrug and trade privacy for convenience. People so blindly follow their GPS devices that every once in a while you hear of someone dying horribly for one loony reason or another. This is evidently making us dumber because we are becoming even more mentally lazy than we were before. Go figure.

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton is an editor and writer for Right Wing News. She owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net. She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com. She also does research at KeyWiki.org. You can email Terresa here. NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.

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