Blind Faith OrTrust But Verify?

I don’t care if it rains or freezes I’ve got my G.P.S. riding on the dashboard of my car. She sits up there yapping away at me like the worst kind of back seat driver but she gets me where I need to go and keeps me from getting lost in the wilderness. At least she does most of the time.

In a long ago and far away era shock jock Don Imus used the American folk song Plastic Jesus by Ed Rush and George Cromarty as the theme for his Rev. Billy Sol Hargus character. “I can go a hundred miles an hour long as I got the almighty power glued up there by my pair of fuzzy dice”. Bitchin’ Bessie, as I like to call my G.P.S., is like that for me. Based on technology instead of faith and communicating through satellites rather than prayer she guides me through the intricacies of strange lands and leads me home safe again at the end of the day.

There was one time however, early in our relationship, when she took me onto land that belongs to the Apache Nation in New Mexico. Nice people, spectacularly beautiful country, but not my planned destination. The rocks in the road just kept getting bigger, the gradient steeper and the washouts deeper as I went higher in my shiny new rental car. I got lucky at about 7000 feet and found a place to turn around. After finding my way back to the main road I went low tech and used a map to reach my destination.

I was in no way facing a tragic situation like the one Albert and Rita Chretien found themselves in during the spring of 2011 when they followed their G.P.S. into the mountainous high desert of Nevada. There were homes and people near where I was and bars enough on my cell phone to call triple A. The worst potential difficulty facing me if things had gone really wrong was explaining to the rental company why I was taking their car places that would scare an ATV. The old joke, “what’s the difference between a rental car and an ATV? A rental car goes anywhere”, probably wouldn’t have played well.

If I’m on an airplane landing in bad weather I know the pilot is using electronic instruments to find the runway and I don’t want anybody up there in the cockpit rolling down the window to have a look around, however, we all know that technology isn’t infallible. Bessie messes up. Rarely, but it happens. I mess up too, more often than Bessie if I’m going to be honest, and program in the wrong info. Redundancy might help but I don’t think I can deal with the prospect of arguing G.P.S. systems competing with talk radio.

Where and when we should start to question technology? Is there a point when we should stop following these devices that serve us so well and that we’ve come to depend on so much? If there is where is that point and how do we know we’ve reached it? Hopefully we can know in time to turn around or climb for altitude but as Mr. and Mrs. Chretien might attest it’s really hard to know exactly where that point is.

Maybe invoking President Regan’s admonition to “trust but verify” is the short term answer but long term, as we all use technology more and more to help navigate our lives, a note of caution is advisable. I still carry a pen and scrap paper in my pocket even though my cell phone will, for better or worse, record anything I say and Bessie has a map to cushion her seat on the dashboard. We may find that the best redundancy will be a marriage of old skills and new technology.