The Danger of Trusting your GPS

A good friend of mine and I got into an argument a couple months back about the rise in use of GPS systems in cars. I said that people would become to attached to the machines and become lost without them. I backed my argument up by asking him to recite my cell phone number and he couldn't. My theory is that just as the use of cell phones has cleared the knowledge of phone number out of our heads GPS would clear out the directions that we've got stored in our minds.
I'm not suggesting that we'd automatically be lost on our way to the store down the road, but getting to a friends house in another city could become downright impossible if the GPS failed and one mysteriously had no phone on them.

The reason I'm writing this is because the Wall Street Journal recently did a write-up on a very similar subject.

As GPS devices spread, drivers are finding that satellite navigation may replace paper maps but not common sense. By blindly following the gadgets' not-always-reliable directions, they're getting lost, hitting dead ends, and even swerving into oncoming traffic.

It sounds like this is becoming a fairly serious problem and I have my own firsthand account. While on a road trip to Chicago with 3 friends we decided that it was time to stop for food in the middle on nowhere Wisconsin. We decided that we wanted to sit down and have a beer if possible as we were in no hurry so we started searching for something outside of the fast food spectrum using my friend B's GPS system. It was dark and snowy and the voice had just directed us off of the highway so we began joking about the cliche horror plot of getting lost in a small town full of murderers and malcontents. We took many turns and got a good 7 miles away from the highway before almost running over what looked like a wolf. At this point we began to get more concerned as we got further into the country with no evidence of a soon approaching town. When we arrived at the "restaurant" we saw only a rusting tractor on a vacant lot.

I think I'll stick to my maps and actually know when I'm lost.