Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Too Technology-Dependent?

Only in America will you hear about a story about someone suing Google Maps for giving "wrong" directions.

A good friend of mine recently told me a story about a friend of hers who got hit by a car because of following directions from Google Maps on her Blackberry, which told her that a walk on a rural highway was the quickest route to get from one place to some other. The road had no sidewalk, and she got struck by a car as she was walking in the middle of the road. Afterward, she filed a suit against Google Maps for giving faulty instructions, which served as the "direct and proximate cause" of the injuries she suffered.

I find it funny (and quite disturbing) that there are some people who will trust the internet more than their own personal judgment. And then those same people will have the audacity to sue the technology developer after an accident caused by lack of brain power.

I find it even funnier (and even more disturbing) that sometimes absurdities like this win or are settled out of court, just because it's less scandalous or less expensive for the company that way.

When the problem exists between keyboard and chair, is technology really to blame? It is difficult to fathom how dependent on technology one get in spite of what one can already see in solid reality. But then, this is just the age-old story of convenience all over again (like with the calculator and doing simple arithmetic), with people becoming dependent and complacent with things they believe to be fully reliable and incapable of error. Human error almost always isn't figured into the calculation, unfortunately.

I don't know how this case turned out, but I'm curious to see if it's been settled.

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