Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

by Tim Harford

Our learned helplessness in the hands of technology is sometimes more amusing than horrifying. In March 2012, three Japanese students visiting Australia decided to drive to North Stradbroke, guided by their GPS system. For some reason the GPS was not aware that their route was blocked by nine miles of the Pacific Ocean. These things happen, of course, but the reaction of the three tourists was extraordinary: in thrall to their technology, they drove their car on to the beach and across the mud flats towards the ocean. As the water lapped around their Hyundai, they realised, to their embarrassment, that they were stuck. With astonished ferry passengers looking on, the students abandoned their car and waded to shore. The car was a write-off. ‘We want to come back to Australia again,’ said one of the men. ‘Everyone is very nice, even today.’ It’s fun to laugh at incompetent tourists. But it is also worth asking how on earth three sentient beings can drive into the Pacific Ocean on the instructions of GPS gone haywire.* Automated systems tend to lull us into passivity. In other contexts, we have a well-known tendency to accept whatever defaults are being suggested to us – for example, in countries where people are signed up by default to an organ donor register unless they tick a box to opt out, almost everyone accepts this default.

Automated systems