If you needed an indication that technology is gradually gaining sentience and plotting our universal demise, look no further than the seemingly humble GPS.
A Canadian woman was plodding along last Thursday when she drove into ice-cold Lake Huron, thanks to the GPS she was using. While this sounds simply idiotic, the police confirm that bad weather might’ve decreased visibility, as she drove down a boat ramp and into the lake, which the GPS clearly believed was a road.
No ad to show here.
“How the launch works, it’s not an airborne thing. It’s not ‘Dukes of Hazzard.’ It kind of goes off the road and the launch just drops all of a sudden,” a constable on the scene told the Toronto Sun.
“So she would have been driving on the road, and then all of a sudden just dropped and hit water.”
The victim, after trusting technology, waited for the pressure in the car to equalise, rolled down the window, grabbed her purse, and swam to shore, reports suggest. The woman escaped the ordeal unharmed.
It’s not the first time that GPSes wreaked havoc with their users’ lives. Back in 2010, a Spanish man drowned after his GPS did the exact same thing, while in 2011, this particular man‘s GPS told him to drive into a house, because, GPSes are clearly evil (based on the evidence, at least).
Granted, the next time you hop in a car with GPS navigation, be sure to trust it only as far as you can throw it (and hopefully, that distance is much, much shorter than a boat launch).
Feature image: whologwhy via Flickr
