Jay Foreman

So it's a rather worrying trend, but not...

a huge amount we can necessarily do about it because they've become so indispensable using GPS to the point that there's now plenty of people who know their way around their city perfectly well and yet even they use GPS because it now has information that you couldn't hope to know yourself such as where the traffic jams are or which roads might be closed.

when they send you on these routes, especially if you use Waze, which is the GPS that specializes in squiggly little shortcuts to avoid even the slightest traffic jam.

And I sometimes wonder, they might be experimenting on you, and they're sending each driver a slightly different way so that they can get data about which way was quicker.

And if that were true, that would explain why several times it said, turn this way, take the little squiggly road to the left, and I've ignored it and got there much faster than it said I would.

except when you don't except when you say you know when you don't there are there are plenty of stories of people who are relying too much on their gps and they end up in some absurd situations and some dangerous situations my favorite story is um there was a couple on holiday in italy they wanted to get to the luxurious island of capri but they drove for hundreds of miles and ended up in the city of capi which is very similar spelling but completely the wrong side of the country

And there were some other people who tried to get to what turned out to be an island in Australia.

And their car was instructed to drive across a lake, which they tried to do.

There was a woman who drove onto train tracks because the sat-nav told her to.

And actually, I think my favorite one of all time, there was a Belgian woman who was supposed to be driving less than an hour away from her house to Brussels railway station to pick up her grandson.

And she drove for more than two days all the way from Belgium to Croatia across five countries.

And she only realized something was wrong when the satnav said, you have reached your destination.

The most recent one that comes to mind is a case in 2012 where Google Maps, which, you know, we usually think of it as the best map that humanity has ever produced and very accurate and updates itself all the time.

An entire island that wasn't there, which dates all the way back to Captain Cook.

So the story is there is an island, a so-called island that isn't there called Sandy Island.

which Captain Cook thought he'd spotted.

To this day, we don't know why he thought there was an island there.

It could be that he'd spotted a different island and didn't know where he was.

Or it might have been a Fata Morgana.

It might have been a speck of dust in his eye.