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| Yes | 52% | 350 votes | Total: 679 votes | |
| No | 48% | 329 votes |
Yes
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It will be a sad day when the Global Positioning Systems replace conventional maps but it will happen! The GPS is a global navigation satellite system, which provides reliable positioning, navigation and timing services to its users worldwide through the use of satellites. This positioning system was fully brought into use in the year 1995 and one of the first companies to use it was Falkirk, an American mining company. They used the system for machine guidance from 1997 onwards and it worked so well that over the next two years the programme was expanded and further GPS systems were bought and today when the company has a total of 12 systems installed and operating in a number of different vehicles. The use of the GPS in this business has resulted in quicker and more accurate work which meant money was being saved and there is higher morale among the machine operators as their job can now be done without the use of surveyors and the conventional map! Everything is faster with the GPS! And this company it only one example of how the use of conventional maps will be wiped out all together.
In private homes and cars it is a lot less messy and a lot handier to have all your maps in one system. Not only will the GPS keep and electronic version of your maps for you it will also speak to you and tell you exactly where to turn as well as showing you on the screen.
People are becoming lazier and lazier as technology grows and grows. People now shop online instead of going to the shop themselves, they talk to people online instead of visiting friends in their houses, they watch films and TV online instead of going to the cinema, or even just getting up to turn the TV on and the GPS is definitely a lazy way of getting from point a to point b.
It saddens me to think that no longer will children have memories of sitting in the back of the car going to visit friends and having to stop seven or eight times to examine the map again, or visiting old ruins with grandparents and instead of having the team effort of working out where it is on the map and where you are and how to get there they will just be told my a mechanical, universal voice exactly which right to take and they will have arrows pointing out exactly where they are to go from a little screen. But maybe the GPS is a good thing, it speeds up travel time which in turn increases business productivity as people are spending less time traveling to work and if my childhood is anything to go by those memorable trips I mentioned earlier usually resulted in some huge fight and lots of shouting, so maybe families will start to get on betterwho knows, maybe the disappearance of the conventional map is a good thing or maybe it is notI guess only time will tell but one thing that I am sure about is that without a doubt the conventional map is well and truly on it's way to being replaced by the GPS.
Learn more about this author, Katie Mcgreal.
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No
As former Chief Technology Officer of NAVTEQ Corp, and the former SVP for Global Marketing and Strategy at that company, it might seem counterintuitive for me to be arguing in the "NO" camp. But before laying out the argument, I'd like to say that Mr. Marcus' line of reasoning is substantially without merit and would like to address that first. The debate as framed is clearly intended to encompass the devices rather than the infrastructure and when he takes pains to point out how the (satellite) infrastructure is not "the map" he misses the essence of the debate. Further, he goes on to say (in paraphrase) a map is a map.
In fact, digital maps for GPS are radically different from printed maps. In the latter, the map is conerned primarily with relative accuracy. "This street is laying in this direction and joins those streets at its ends". A user of such a map is unconcerned with absolute positional accuracy and such maps can be permitted to be hundreds of meters adrift from "ground truth" without substantial loss of function. A digital GPS map does need to be absolutely accurate and (as an obvious by-product of this) also relatively accurate. Otherwise the GPS receiver(concerned only with coordinates) will place the device in a location which doesn't line up with the map's view of that location.
So, having clarified this point, why do I argue that GPS won't replace conventional maps?
Debates often hinge not differences of substance between protagonists and antagonists but on their different readings of the terms in the title. If we can get past such interpretive differences we can argue the core substance of the debate at least as I (and I hope most people) interpret the title.
In this case, having posited that GPS here means the devices which leverage the infrastructure more than they mean the infrastructure per se, we need to further clarify what we mean by "conventional maps". In my opinion this term is not restricted to the choice of medium. Instead it refers to a manner of usage in which the human does the interpretation of spatial information which may or may not involve them placing themselves in its context. In this way, for me at least, the term "conventional map" means a map depicted on a medium for direct human interpretation. By this approach, we can describe an "unconventional map" as being one which is either not depicted on a medium or not intended for (or amenable to) direct human interpretation. It is interesting to note that many GPS devices (especially the earlier ones in automobiles) did not bother to display a map as such. They simply gave turn instructions (arrows and words) in anticipation of upcoming maneuvers. Though a digital map was being used inside the GPS device, the user was never presented with its contents. Only the consequences of using its contents.
I believe maps (conventional or otherwise) serve a very large variety of purposes and only some (perhaps even a large majority) but not ALL purposes will demand an the unconventional map required for GPS.
So, conventional maps may become digital and the medium might be an LCD but they'll be conventional and serve those other purposes. They might even be aboslutely accurate and fit for GPS usage, but as long as they're being used "conventionally" they'll be conventional.
If we take this perhaps purist view, even when paper maps are to be found only in museums, GPS devices will not completely replace conventional maps since those devices won't be fit for whatever non GPS purpose the conventional map is being used for by a human viewer.
Learn more about this author, Salahuddin Khan.
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