A history of GPS examines the costs of relying on it.
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.)
Read the complete article in Bloomberg Businessweek
