Maps, navigation and technology

I think we do rely on them too much, but I'd frame it slightly differently: it isn't that the apps are bad, it's that we've stopped building any mental map of our own because the phone does it for us. I've watched friends who have lived in the same city for years follow a blue line to a place they've been a dozen times. The cost isn't just a weaker sense of direction — there's some evidence that the part of the brain handling spatial memory actually shrinks with disuse, which is a slightly alarming thought. That said, I wouldn't want to go back. For a tourist, a delivery driver, or anyone in an unfamiliar city at night, an app is genuinely safer and more efficient than a folded paper map. As for whether people will still need to read maps in the future, I'd say the skill will survive but shift. Hardly anyone will unfold a paper map again, but understanding scale, direction and how a route relates to the actual terrain is still useful — for hiking, for reading a floor plan, for noticing when the app is confidently sending you into a river. The honest answer is that it will become a niche skill, a bit like knowing how to light a fire: most people won't need it most of the time, and on the few occasions they do, they'll really wish they had it.