Pinpoint

How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

By: Greg Milner

Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer

Over the last 50 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.

©2016 Greg Milner (P)2016 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Funny, scary, and tremendously readable." (Andrew Blum, author of Tubes)

great book on the unseen infrastructure of navigat

some reviewers found the non-linear chronology of this book frustrating. However, if you look at it from a perspective of the development of navigational concepts and technology, it flows very well. It is a well written and narrated book, but may be a bit technically heavy for the non-techies. I loved it though. Definitely a great addition to my library of modern infrastructure books.

Really found this interesting

My early IT career included support for a land surveyor who purchased one of the first generation surveying systems made by Trimble. The very little information i remember from working with him left me with terms relating to gps and a fascination with its use. This book really filled in the gaps in my understanding of the system and a renewed appreciation and amazement of what it is...

How did we live before gps

very engaging. I was completely unaware of how important gps is to our everyday life, beyond just Google maps

Really enjoyed this book

this is a quite interesting book There is enough technical information to be informative without being overwhelming and enough stories to keep things interesting.
it really shows how important GPS has become in the modern world in ways that I never knew about.
kept my attention through the entire book.

Well researched and written

History of gps and also technical details of implementation, geography and geodesy. Interesting. Stories of early navigation by James Cook and Tupaia, although I am not sure what Rube Goldberg has to do with Mars☺ . Also good talk about NGA and space program.