Teetering on the edge (picture: Sky News)A man called Robert Jones was almost led over a cliff by his satellite navigation system.
Blogger Chris Skoyles calls Mr Jones a 'muppet' and says his is the behaviour of another 'moronic motorist', but how far would you trust your sat-nav before you realise it is leading you astray?
Imagine you are in a car and you are heading for a destination new and completely unfamiliar to you, not just somewhere you know inside out.
Your satellite navigation seems to be taking you in the right direction (as far as you know) until it starts to lead you down a narrow gravel path. You may think it strange. It could cross your mind that the road is a little narrow. But it could also cross your mind that, for all you know, which is nothing, it is the right way, so perhaps you would keep going.
The road is a little steep, and you gather speed, until you crash through a fence towards the edge of a cliff. It could all happen very quickly.
That is what happened to Mr Jones and, unless he was suicidal, I don't think he would have done as Mr Skoyles suggests, which is to 'willingly allow his satellite navigation system to nearly drive him off the edge of a cliff', because that wasn't what he asked it to do, was it?
The other thing which puzzles me about this case, is that Mr Jones was charged with 'driving without due care'. It may not have been that he was driving without due care, and he was certainly unlikely to have hurt anyone unless he was driving like a maniac.
All he was guilty of is what many of us human beings are guilty of every day, which is trusting technnology too much to get the job right. On this point, Mr Skoyles is right that computers are indeed not infallible and they should always be our slaves, not our masters.
But Mr Skoyles' overall assessment that Mr Jones is 'a muppet' is harsh because this is one of those freak incidents which could happen to any man and, had he not been following the instructions of a faulty sat-nav but a map which had been printed incorrectly, would he have been deemed a fool for trusting a map of an area he did not know. I think not, so why is he a fool for trusting his sat-nav?
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