Following On Faith

It's a well-known fact that smart phones have killed the art of the bar room debate. Since everyone now has the Internet at their fingertips, people can look up answers to questions in roughly ten seconds and no one bothers to defend their positions anymore. Admittedly, this does save a lot of conflict and I'm sure the bouncers of America are grateful for it. The only problem with this instant-answer technology is that now nobody knows anything for sure, as people tend to second-guess themselves about every answer until they look up the facts online. People seem to constantly have a little voice in the back of their brain saying, "I think this is right, but I had better check." And no where is this lack of self-confidence in our answers more obvious than when it comes to driving directions.

The other day a friend and I were heading out on an adventure. Now, neither of us had been to the exact place we were going before, but we had both previously been in the general area. I was about 75% sure which way we should go, my friend was closer to 85%. Still, we thought it was probably the smartest plan to type the address into the GPS and follow its lead. For the first hour of the journey my instincts and the GPS were in unison. But when it came time to switch roads, some doubt started to creep in. It felt to me as though the computer wanted us to take an unusual turn, going in a direction I was not expecting. I wasn't the only one who thought this was wrong, as my buddy who was driving voiced his doubt. Despite that, as we reached the exit we found ourselves following the directions of the calm, British-accented female voice coming from the dashboard.

Turns out that we should have been a little more confident in ourselves, because had we gone the way we both were thinking we would have gotten there faster. The place we were trying to go to was pretty much smack in the middle of this one stretch of highway and the GPS sent us to one end of the highway instead of the other. It was technically the more direct and shorter route, but had we gone the way we both wanted to we would have been spent more time cruising on the open-highway instead of dealing with traffic lights and cars in front of us stopping to turn on and off the road. In the end it worked out alright because we did get to our destination safe and sound, just slower than we should have. (This was confirmed when we took the more highway-friendly route home and got back about 25 minutes faster than it took us to get there in the first place.)

There have been countless sci-fi shows based on the premise of humanity blindly doing what computers tells us to do and I'm starting to worry they may have been on to something. This especially bothered me because I'm not normally the kind of person who doubts himself. The problem is that I rarely use GPS. It only comes out when I'm not totally sure about which way to go and therefore naturally inclined to listen to the machine even if think it is wrong. (Plus, I really hate that annoyed tone it uses when you don't go the way it wants you to and it tells you that it is "Recalculating".) Still, going forward I should remind myself just who is in charge here. Also, every now and again I'm going to stubbornly defend a position I know is wrong during a bar debate, just to keep myself from falling out of practice.