GPS navigation…but what is it doing to us?

In the classic film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch and Sundance try every devious trick they know to lose the posse chasing them. Yet they keep coming on, prompting Butch to exclaim in exasperation: “Who are those guys?” Spotting one man on the ground, looking for clues, Sundance thinks it's Lord Baltimore, a “full-blooded Indian...who could track anybody, over anything, day or night.” Perhaps the fictional Lord Baltimore was portrayed a sigma or two out on the bell curve of Native American tracking ability, but survival in a pre-GPS navigational milieu demanded such skills. This paper will examine the flip side of GPS navigation, asking what the technology doing it all for us is also doing to us. The conventional wisdom insists that we have better things to do than find our own way from here to there without turn by turn directions. While it may be true that losing the ability to find one's own way, as once we were compelled, may be no great loss, as a tributary feeding into the river of what's going on across the board of human skill erosion, it's a symptom of far more serious summing going on.