Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

Over the last fifty years, humanity has developed an extraordinary shared utility: the Global Positioning System. Omnipresent, free, and available to all, GPS powers everything from your phone to the Internet to the Mars Rover. Greg Milner tells the sweeping story of GPS from its conceptual origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity. While GPS has revolutionized methods of timekeeping, navigation, and seismological prediction, it has also altered human behavior, introducing phenomena such as "Death by GPS," in which drivers blindly follow their devices into deserts, lakes, and impassable mountains. Milner also shows the desperate vulnerabilities in the system we now use to predict the weather, track prisoners, and land airplanes. Delving into the neuroscience of cognitive maps and spatial recognition, Milner's inventive and timely book is at once a grand history of the scientific urge toward precision and perfection and a revelatory philosophy of how humans understand themselves in the world.

About the Author :
Greg Milner is the author of Pinpoint and the National Book Critics Circle finalist Perfecting Sound Forever, about the history of recorded sound. A former senior contributing writer and columnist for Spin magazine, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Review :
"GPS guides our world. Here at last is the amazing and well-told story of where it came from, how it works, and where it—and we—are going." "In Pinpoint, Greg Milner gives us a much-needed account of GPS, its history, philosophy, and the overwhelming consequences of its success. Funny, scary, and tremendously readable, Pinpoint will be an eye-opening thrill for anyone who has watched their blue dot dance around an online map." "Whenever people theorize about the collision of technology and culture, the Internet tends to consume all the oxygen in the room. But there is another global system that's taking over our lives in an even more insidious fashion, with stranger implications for the future of humanity. Pinpoint dissects the modern age of mapping and shows the hidden dangers of a world where nothing is hidden at all." "Seldom have I learned so much so effortlessly. . . . Every page was a treasure-house of fascinations: my temptation after finishing was to begin the book all over again, there being so much to absorb, all of it crucially important to understanding our world's dependence on one of modern civilization's new-made fundamentals." "Informative... Pinpoint excels when it makes clear that GPS is an engineering marvel, a global utility and a source of new threat all at once." "Remarkably engaging… [T]he best business book about technology this year." "Milner is a brisk and funny guide." "No technology has transformed the human landscape so completely, yet been taken for granted so quickly, as GPS. The reason that brains are so good at storing maps is because the brain is a map, and our collective internal map is now migrating somewhere else. Greg Milner’s Pinpoint is a fascinating chronicle of how this happened and why—captured before the details had a chance to escape." "An informative yarn." "[A] joy to read… It will be a strong contender for my science book of 2016." "One of the most mesmerizing and exhilarating, yet alarming modern technology books… By any standards, it is an extraordinary tale." "[A]ssured technological history." "A deeply researched book with fascinating interludes... [Milner] explains the technological principles lucidly." "[A] suitably precise and fascinating account of the modern evolution of [GPS]... Milner expertly deconstructs the implications of this monumental shift in human life." "[A] compelling exploration of how GPS became so ubiquitous—and what we lose when it's all we know of navigation." "Through a multitude of examples—from Polynesian navigation to precision agriculture to the U.S. military—the world according to GPS emerges, and with it a new way to understand our own sense of place and time... Milner's detailed examples will leave you questioning the ways in which GPS has infiltrated our lives." "In this startling and persuasive book, American journalist Greg Milner shows how [GPS] saturates our existence... [Milner] suggests that GPS is as potent and pervasive a force as the Internet – if much less well understood." "[A] welcome guide to where [GPS] came from, what it does and where it might be taking us." "Dramatically illustrating just what the GPS might be taking from the human race, Milner recounts the feats of early Polynesian seafarers who traversed wide Pacific expanses guided by nothing but their dauntless minds. . . . [A] fascinating probe into an increasingly ubiquitous technology."