In The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr describes how over-reliance on computerized automation is a force for deskilling. In outsourcing our labor and our thinking to machines, we come to increasingly depend on those same machines to the point that we cannot make do in the world without them. One such example is GPS. The sad truth is that most of us can no longer find our own way, even within the confines of our own cities, without GPS.

Carr describes how Inuit hunters in Igloolik, once able to navigate “vast stretches of barren arctic terrain” through “profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, tides, and currents” now increasingly depend on GPS to do the same. The result is increased risk of disaster for younger generations of Inuit:

When a receiver breaks or its batteries freeze, a hunter who hasn’t developed strong wayfinding skills can easily become lost in the featureless waste and fall victim to exposure.

The adoption of GPS amongst the Inuit is causing the extinction of a generations-old survival skill for an entire people:

A singular talent that has defined and distinguished a people for thousands of years may well evaporate over the course of a generation or two.

In Magic and the Machine David Abrams makes a similar observation about GPS, noting that wayfinding requires being deeply in touch with our place on the earth. To navigate without the aid of technology we must use all our senses to the fullest — to view the stars, to feel the wind, to hear the calls of migratory birds.

But now, using GPS, we’ve interrupted that old rapport between our bodies and the earthly sensuous. We’re no longer noticing the patterns of the place we are in, registering the sounds and the smells and the shape of various landforms as we pass them—because we’re synapsed to the smartphone, taking directions from a device that’s taking its directions from a complex of thirty-two satellites orbiting the earth twelve and a half thousand miles above our heads! We no longer know where we are anymore without GPS to tell us; indeed, we no longer really inhabit our places, since we spend so much time living via satellite. That is painful, and sad—the forfeiting of something so primal, so precious, so intimately a part of us that we hardly notice it slipping away.

These last two sentences are heavy hitters. If “we no longer really inhabit our places,” what, exactly, are we inhabiting anymore?