I drove to Kosice, Slovakia once by a Tom Tom satnav... If I believe a word of that, I cannot arrive. It wanted to direct me into some non-existing roads, some other roads to the wrong way, a walkway and a tram station.
Even if you have an updated Satnav sw and you can rely on it, there is always something: detour, accident, congestion. One shouldn't forget that Satnav is an aid and not a control. :)
Technology and brainless driving
By: Dan Keegan
Date: Saturday, 20. January 2007
Sometimes the luddites, the rejectors of technology, have a point. If we turn our brain off and hand over to technology the results can be ludicrous.
A UK ambulance crew found this out the hard way -- they were assigned to transfer a patient to a hospital some 8 miles and about 20 minutes away in Brentwood, northeast of London. When the trip turned into a satellite-navigated 200-mile, 8-hour odyssey it was more traumatic for the crew than for the patient.
The patient was, reportedly, not affected adversely. The crew had to weather a storm of ridicule about their trip to Manchester. Their bosses ordered them to take geography lessons.
In a similar case, an American Band that missed their own sold-out concert in Cheltenham northwest of London after directions for Chelmsford, more than 140 miles (220 kilometres) to the east, were mistakenly fed into their bus's onboard Satellite Navigation System (Satnav).
Heading east when your destination is west is a major mistake of navigation, but the group could be forgiven. They're an American Motown tribute band that performs music created by the original Four Tops, and unfamiliar with the geography of England. The bus driver, however, should have known better. So also should the middle-aged German motorist who obeyed his satnav's order to "turn right now" and demolished a roadside toilet not far from his intended intersection.
In Europe, where traffic congestion and complex roads make Satnav a much more valuable tool than with North America's grid system, these kinds of stories abound. It's obvious that motorists are shifting their brains to other tasks and relying too much on the navigation technology to guide them to their destination.
Wrong information fed into Satnavs, outdated maps, lack up information about road repairs and detours are some of the culprits when things go wrong. However, invariably, the human element is also involved.
Cases in point:
An 80-year-old German motorist who followed his satnav instead of common sense and ignored a "closed for construction" sign on a Hamburg motorway. He hit a pile of sand at high speed but was not hurt.
A 29-year-old English woman who misread her satnav and drove the wrong way on a motorway for more than 12 miles (about 20 km)
"It's hard to understand how these things can happen," Maximilian Maurer, a spokesman for the German motoring club ADAC, told a journalist.
Maurer finds it hard to understand how such incidents happen. "You'd think they would have their own eyes and brains engaged to make decisions and not rely on the satnav," he said.
However, handing over control of our car to a computer is normal rather than unusual. Most of us drive absent-mindedly a good deal of the time - some more so than others. Driving psychologists call this "automated" driving. We let a 'computer' in our brain take over the operation of the vehicle while we allocate attention to other tasks such as chatting, thinking about personal matters or using mobile phones.
Driving psychologist Kenneth C. Mills has devoted his career to researching the difficulty we drivers have keeping our minds on the job. In his book "Disciplined Attention," he describes extensive training programs he has developed to help us deal with the problem.
In light of this, handing over our thinking to satnav is hardly surprising. Automatic transmissions mean we don't have to think about shifting gears. Shouldn't satnav mean we don't have to think about which way we turn to get to our destination?
That idea gives UK blogger John Conners the creeps. And it isn't only handing our fate over to technology that freaks him out, it's the idea that we so easily surrender to scripted behavior in all aspects of our lives.
By way of example he cites a Shopping mall fire in the U.S in which the number of fatalities bewildered investigators. Many of the fatalites, it was theorized, died because they didn't take the fire seriously and wouldn't leave without paying their bills like the good customers they were.
"As far as I'm concerned," writes Connors, "once you stop thinking you're a drone. Soldiers are trained to always think on their feet so they can react to situations rather than standing slack-jawed as enemy fire comes in. And so it is with satellite navigation."
Whether we're giving control to a Satnav, a scripted behaviour routine, or sub-conscious automated driving habits, we're making ourselves vulnerable.
Maybe we should learn a lesson from the Squirrels in the park. No matter how tame they seem, or how trustingly they take food from our hands, they seem to still retain the native alertness and quick natural reflexes of the wild.
Think of the squirrels next time you trust Satnav, or antilock braking systems (ABS), or stability control. And you might also pay attention to world-renowned risk psychologist Gerald J.S. Wilde.
Any technology or improvement that attempts to make our lives safer, professor Wilde believes, tends to result in a change in behavior that confounds the effort.
We all have a comfort level of risk we accept in our lives, professor Wilde argues. Give us better brakes and we'll drive faster and harder. Give us Satnav and we'll pay less attention to where we're going and more to other matters.
Technology always seems to have this other-side-of-the-coin aspect to it. We probably need much more education and training if we're to effectively handle all the new technological benefits coming at us like flying debris in a hurricane.
Further comments to this article have been disabled.
All Comments (3)
Showing 1 - 3 comments
Born 2B Wide (HUN),
Carlos,
Excelente articulo
salvi,
Buen artículo
