People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.
I think this is a risky side to take. Consider that your argument isn't all that far from a kid wondering why they should learn math. After all if they ever needed to use it, they could just use a calculator, like the one they bought from the clerk who whipped our her trusty calculator to determine how much change to give for the 120 coin calculator that was paid for with 200 coins.
Navigational skills are likely not only improving our mind in ways we might not otherwise appreciate, but also serves a countless practical scenarios. Something as simple as getting around at a large market or mall often comes down to the exact same skills as reading a map. In fact that is what you're often literally doing as you find a floor map to locate the location you'd like to go to.
There are also examples on the other side. Read this [1] warning from the national parks service about GPS and Death Valley. Multiple people blindly following GPS there have lost their lives because of it, and countless other similar locations that are quite remote and where what your GPS tells you, and what reality tells you may often contradict.
Finally, if we ever enter into a war against another major power - on day one of the war, all GPS is going to cease to exist for the foreseeable future (with the internet not far behind). Those satellites are sitting ducks and are going to be high priority targets. This shouldn't even be an argument, but this scenario is looking increasingly likely with every passing day.
I used to be a (literal) boyscout. I spent a lot of time camping in the backcountry of Death Valley (Butte Valley) before it got closed off, and even more in the Utah Badlands. I got my orienteering patch, and also wander around A LOT in the wilderness (legit, no cell phone, poor GPS stuff) to this day. And I don't always bring a GPS or a phone.
It's been over 2 decades since I got lost outdoors (and then only for about an hour), but I do sometimes get lost in a complex urban environments. Which street goes where again? Especially when I'm on a continent I haven't been on for awhile. I've been told I have an excellent sense of direction.
I also grew up before hand held GPS was a thing, let alone smart phones.
Even back then, almost no one had a decent sense of direction, people got lost and delayed getting to new places all the time, etc. If you asked someone which way was North, at least 75% of people would have no clue or thought they knew and then pointed the wrong way.
The way people dealt with it was by NOT GOING TO NEW PLACES MUCH, or by bringing someone who had been there before, or just being late a lot the first few times.
I also think it's dumb to suggest someone be trying to juggle a (usually outdated) paper map and orient themselves that way, ESPECIALLY in traffic with little notice, instead of just using GPS. And if you think people are going to be able or willing to pull over somewhere to pull out the map and look, well, go watch what people actually do in traffic now and tell me again. A lot of people don't seem to be willing to even go to the next freeway exit when they miss theirs, preferring to rampage across dividers instead.
It also used to be people would bring someone along to be the navigator because it was so difficult. Now people can explore on their own easier.
In the event of a war and GPS gets taken out, solar apocalypses, etc. it's going to suck for that and many other reasons, but it's not like it helps suggesting they use the old terrible way in the mean time. Because even on a good day, that was pretty terrible.
> Consider that your argument isn't all that far from a kid wondering why they should learn math. After all if they ever needed to use it, they could just use a calculator, like the one they bought from the clerk who whipped our her trusty calculator to determine how much change to give for the 120 coin calculator that was paid for with 200 coins.
Well yes, it’s exactly like that argument, and they’re both valid!
I'm not talking about cold starts, to be clear. I'm talking about the situation where "one minute ago I was here, and I have moved at roughly this speed in roughly this direction for that minute. Where's the centre of the small circle I'm probably in now?"
Ah yes, “just” check the map. When I was a kid if my Mom made a wrong turn on a way to a doctor’s appointment a few counties over (I got sick a lot as a kid) I’d have to reach under my seat and figure out which of the multiple paper map books corresponded to where we were. Until GPS I had no visual sense of “where we were” when we were out of my town (I don’t understand the “relying on GPS makes you worse at navigating” people), so I was basically useless at reading or interpreting the maps. Mom would need to pull over, but that meant finding some way to get off the unfamiliar highway we’d just turned onto, which could take a few minutes (or more, if the exit we took put us on another highway).
So now we’re several minutes off course, flipping through the pages in this other county’s map, trying to figure out how to get to a doctor’s office in a building whose parking lot has a one-way entrance that’s in the back, but first we’re low on gas and need to find a gas station that hasn’t closed down since the maps were printed.
And then suddenly, we got this GPS thing, and this awful fixture of my childhood was gone. “Getting lost” just stopped being a thing around the mid-2000s. Screw the 1950s, 1990s me would find the current status of driving to be an unimaginable utopia.
Ok. So you were a child and not good at reading a road map of an area near your home to locate a physician that you visited frequently. The vast majority of society managed to navigate using paper maps for centuries with little fanfare.
GPS maps are an improvement not a major innovation, which is the main point. They are more convenient and require less skill, but they are functionally a paper map with a dot on it that changes based on your location.
Finding a gas station in an unfamiliar area, however, is definitely improved by a GPS map. So, you can now run the fuel tank down a little further before filling it up. Nice, but again not revolutionary in my opinion.
Everybody should keep a spiral bound atlas in their car. The dependence we are all discussion on GPS will be _really_ painful in the event of a crisis when your cell service stops working and you can't find your way home from 2 miles away.
People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.