Last week I was driving to my uncle’s house. A road I have taken a hundred times. At the intersection near the old mosque, my instinct said turn left. The GPS said turn right.
I turned right.
The GPS took me on a longer route, through construction and traffic. I arrived twenty minutes late. My uncle laughed when I told him. “You followed the machine instead of your own head?” He found this very amusing. I found it disturbing.
I have been thinking about that moment ever since. About why I trusted a satellite over thirty years of driving these streets. About what we are losing when we outsource our minds to machines.
I know that road. I know where it floods during monsoon. I know which stretch has potholes the municipality never fixes. I know that the left turn looks longer on a map but moves faster because fewer people use it. This knowledge lives in my body, accumulated through years of driving, observing, remembering. It is not data I can articulate. It is wisdom I have absorbed.
The GPS knows none of this. It knows distance and average traffic patterns. It processes information from servers and satellites. It calculates optimal routes based on mathematics. But it does not know that the shortcut through the market is impassable on Fridays. It does not know that the bridge near the school is dangerous after dark. It does not know what I know.
And yet I trusted it over myself.
This is what technology has done to us. It has made us doubt our own minds. The machine seems so precise, so certain. It speaks in that calm voice, never hesitating, never unsure. Meanwhile, my intuition is messy and inarticulate. I cannot explain why I feel left is better. I just feel it. And feelings seem inferior to algorithms.
But intuition is not just feeling. Intuition is compressed experience. When I sense that left is better, my subconscious is processing thousands of data points I am not aware of—the time of day, the day of week, the weather, the traffic patterns I have observed over decades. My brain is running calculations too complex to articulate. The result arrives as a feeling, but the process behind it is sophisticated.
The GPS has data. I have wisdom. These are not the same thing.
My father never used GPS. He could navigate any city by landmarks and instinct. He remembered routes he had driven once, twenty years ago. His spatial memory was extraordinary. When I was young, I thought this was a special gift. Now I understand it was simply a skill that humans develop when they have to.
We no longer have to. The GPS will remember for us. So we stop remembering. The skill atrophies. The mental muscle weakens. We become dependent on the machine not because it is better than us, but because we have allowed ourselves to become worse.
I watch my children. They cannot read maps. They do not know which direction is north. If you took away their phones, they would be lost in their own city. This is not their fault. They grew up in a world where knowing directions was unnecessary. The machine always knew. Why bother learning what the machine could tell you?
But machines fail. Batteries die. Signals drop. Servers crash. And when they do, what remains? A generation that has forgotten how to find its way home.
GPS is only one example. We have outsourced so much of our thinking that I sometimes wonder what is left.
We no longer remember phone numbers. The phone remembers. We no longer calculate in our heads. The calculator calculates. We no longer know facts. Google knows. We no longer navigate. GPS navigates. We have distributed our minds across devices, and the part that remains inside our skulls grows smaller every year.
I am not saying technology is bad. I use it constantly. I am grateful for it. But I am also aware of the trade-off. Every function I delegate to a machine is a function I no longer develop in myself. Every skill I outsource is a skill I lose.
The question is whether we are using technology as a tool or surrendering to it as a master.
A tool extends your capability. You remain in control. You make decisions; the tool helps execute them. A master makes decisions for you. You follow. You obey. You stop thinking because thinking is no longer required.
When I override the GPS because I know better, I am using it as a tool. When I follow the GPS against my own judgment, I have made it my master. The distinction seems small. Over time, it becomes everything.
I have started a small rebellion. Nothing dramatic. Just small acts of cognitive independence.
I try to drive familiar routes without GPS, even when the GPS is available. I force myself to remember. I make wrong turns sometimes. I arrive late occasionally. But my mental map is rebuilding. The landmarks are returning. The instinct is reawakening.
I try to calculate small sums in my head before reaching for the calculator. I try to recall facts before searching Google. I try to remember phone numbers of people I love. These feel like pointless exercises in a world where machines can do it all faster and better.
But they are not pointless. They are practice. They are maintenance of a mind that wants to remain capable of thinking for itself.
My uncle, the one who laughed at me, is eighty-three. He has never used GPS. He drives across the country using only his memory and paper maps he has had for decades. He gets lost sometimes. He asks strangers for directions. He arrives at his destinations by a combination of knowledge, instinct, and human connection.
He is free in a way I am not. He does not need a charged battery to find his way. He does not need satellite signals to know where he is. His mind contains what it needs. He is sufficient unto himself.
I want to be like him. Not by rejecting technology—that would be foolish and impossible—but by refusing to let it replace what I am capable of being.
Next time the GPS says turn right and my instinct says turn left, I will turn left. I might be wrong. The GPS might have known something I didn’t. But I will have trusted myself. I will have exercised the muscle instead of letting it atrophy.
And if I am wrong, I will learn from it. I will add the experience to my accumulated wisdom. I will become slightly better at navigating my own world.
That is something no machine can do for me.
That is something I must do for myself.