Most humans who have ever lived have known roughly where they were, day by day, year by year. Not in abstract terms, of course, but in the terms of experience and familiarity—by neighborhood, not map. For eons, we've known things about ourselves that could be expressed in a statement like "I'm standing on the threshing floor in the village of my birth," or "I'm walking across the mid-morning shadow cast by Notre Dame." Or even "I'm in a part of town I've never seen before." Whether we utter it or not, this awareness of "whereness" is part of the meaning of being human. But for centuries, a dedicated band of mapmakers, navigators, astronomers, inventors, and mathematicians has tried to turn this innate sense of place into a more precise determination of position that is intelligible to anyone, not just to locals. On one level, this is like the difference between knowing you're coming to the corner where you always turn left on your way to the grocery store and knowing the names of the streets that cross at that intersection. On another level, however, the pursuit of pure position is about to lead us into a world that not one of us has ever seen. The agent of change will be gps—the Global Positioning System, which, like so many tools of the modern world, is familiar and misunderstood at the same time.
Until recently, not a single human-made object has ever known where it was. Even a venerable tool of navigation like a sextant knows nothing more about its location than does the Mona Lisa or the pigments of which she is painted. So imagine a world in which man-made objects know where they are and can communicate that information to other self-locating, communicating objects too. This sounds as strange and surprising as the Marauder’s Map in the Harry Potter novels for children. The Marauder’s Map shows the position and movement of every animate creature at the school of wizardry called Hogwarts. A Marauder’s Map of the world would be even stranger. It would show the position and movement—a history of movements, too, if needed—of man-made objects as well. This would be an ever-changing map of a world filled with artifacts busily announcing something significant about themselves to each other and to anyone else who cared to listen.
That world is nearly here. In August, a company called SiRF Technology, based in Santa Clara, California, announced that it had developed an advanced GPS chip no bigger than a postage stamp. Kanwar Chadha, one of SiRF’s founders, declared, “Our vision is to bring location awareness to virtually everything that moves.” This is a subtle but profound change in the history of GPS technology—a change driven, like everything else these days, by increasing miniaturization and declining prices for sophisticated circuitry. In the past few years, consumers have grown used to the sight of handheld GPS receivers, which have been marketed as individual positioning devices for anglers, hunters, hikers, and cyclists—tools, in other words, for establishing one’s individual bodily location. But what SiRF and other companies like it have in mind is conferring upon objects a communicable sense of place. One day soon, the vast majority of GPS devices will not be stand-alone receivers used by those of us who venture off the beaten path but integral components of everyday objects.
Some of these objects, especially the big ones, are easy enough to imagine, because they exist now. Boats and ships of every kind already incorporate GPS technology, as do some automobiles made by Toyota, Honda, Lexus, and Cadillac. So do the newest farm implements, like combines that allow farmers to map crop yields in precise detail. But some uses of GPS that are not yet widely available will soon be common in smaller devices. Beginning next October, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission will require cellular-phone service providers to be able to identify the location of a cell-phone caller who dials 911. This means that most cell phones will likely include a tiny GPS chip. So will beepers and watches and handheld digital assistants and, who knows, Game Boy Colors and Tamagotchis and dog collars and probably handguns too.
