I want to tell you about Sarah. I'll change a few details to protect her, but the moment I want you to see is exact, because she described it to me precisely, and because I have not been able to stop thinking about it.
Sarah had driven the same highway for eight years. The route between her house north of the city and the office downtown — a stretch of road she knew the way you know a person you've lived beside for a long time. Not consciously. Not through deliberate memorization. Completely.
She knew the exits by feel. The specific way the road curved before Exit 14. The overpass where the freight trains crossed on Tuesday mornings. The billboard for the steakhouse that had been there since she was a child and that she had never once considered visiting. She knew this road in her body. She could have driven it half-asleep and arrived exactly where she needed to be.
That was before the GPS.
Last spring, somewhere on the interstate, the app went dark. A dead zone. A glitch. It didn't matter which. Sarah did something she hadn't done in years.
She tried to remember where she was.
She could not do it.
She recognized the landscape in the vague, unhelpful way you recognize a face you've seen once before but can't place — there were trees, there was a water tower, the sun was in a particular position — but the map in her mind had gone soft, the way a photograph goes when you leave it in the sun too long. She could feel that something was there, in the place where the knowledge should have been, but she could not reach it.
There was a fog between her and the information.
She pulled over to the shoulder, turned on the hazard lights, and called her sister.
'I don't know where I am,' she said. 'I'm on 95, I think.'
Her sister laughed, the easy laugh of someone who finds this sort of thing mildly funny and not at all alarming.
Sarah did not laugh.
'I used to know this road,' she told me later. 'I could have driven it with my eyes closed. Now I can't drive it with my eyes open.'
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said something I have thought about many times since.
It's not like I forgot. I didn't forget. It's more like the thing that did the remembering is gone.
What happened to Sarah is not a story about GPS. GPS is a magnificent technology. It has saved lives, enabled travel, made cities accessible to people who would otherwise have been confined to familiar routes. The problem is not the GPS.
The problem is what happens when you stop using a part of yourself — not because you forget it exists, but because something else offers to do it for you, and you say yes, because yes is easier, and because the help looks so much like progress that the cost is invisible until the day you need the thing you gave away.
What Sarah lost was not data. She still knew, abstractly, that she lived north of the city. She had not forgotten facts. What she had lost was something more intimate and more essential: the embedded knowledge. The knowledge that lives in the body, that is navigational rather than propositional, that lets you move through a familiar world without having to think about it because thinking has already been done, for years, until it became something else. Something deeper. Something less like knowing and more like being.
This kind of knowledge takes years to build. It is built through repetition and attention, through the slow accumulation of landmarks and turns and spatial relationships, through the particular experience of being lost and finding your way back. It cannot be downloaded. It cannot be transferred from one mind to another. And it cannot survive intact if the activity that sustains it is handed off to a machine.
The brain is not a hard drive. You cannot store spatial knowledge in a GPS and retrieve it from yourself when needed. The knowledge is not the destination. The knowledge is the process of getting there. And when you hand the process to the GPS, the knowledge does not wait patiently for you to reclaim it.
It begins to dissolve. Slowly, without announcement, at a rate you will not notice until you pull over to the shoulder on a road you have driven eight hundred times and find that it is suddenly, somehow, unfamiliar.
I think most of us are, in some quiet domain of our lives, on Sarah's shoulder. We don't know it yet. The road we used to know — the one that was so embedded we never had to think about it — has gone soft on us. Maybe it isn't a literal road. Maybe it's a craft we used to do without help, a kind of attention we used to sustain, a quality of judgment we used to bring to a hard question without reaching for the tool. We're using the tool now. The tool is excellent. We have stopped noticing what the tool replaced.
The cost will not arrive as a single moment. It will arrive as the slow disappearance of the thing that did the remembering.