More than a billion people around the world have smartphones, almost all of which come with navigation (导航) apps such as Google or Apple Maps. This raises the question we meet with any technology: what skills are we losing? Talking with people who're good at finding their way around or using paper maps, I often hear lots of frustration with digital maps. North/South direction gets messed up, and you can see only a small section at a time.
But consider what digital navigation aids have meant for someone like me. Despite being a frequent traveler, I'm so terrible at finding my way that I still use Google Maps every day in the small town where I have lived for many years. What looks like an imperfect product to some has been a significant expansion of my own abilities.
Part of the problem is that reading paper maps requires specific skills. There is nothing natural about them. In many developed nations, including the U. S. , one expects street names and house numbers to be meaningful references, and instructions such as "go north for three blocks and then west" make sense. In Istanbul, in contrast, where I grew up, none of those hold true. For one thing, the locals rarely use street names. Why bother when a government or a military group might change them again? Besides, the city is full of winding, ancient alleys that meet newer avenues at many angles. Instructions as simple as "go north" would require a helicopter or a bulldozer (推土机).
Let's come back to my original questions. While we often lose some skills after leaving the work to technology, it may also allow us to expand our abilities. Consider the calculator: I don't doubt that our arithmetic skills might have dropped a bit as the little machines became common, but calculations that were once boring and tricky are now much more straightforward—and one can certainly do more complex calculations more confidently.
