The trouble I see is in how these GPS based driving systems give directions. Even when the directions are accurate and the pronunciation is good (ha) and the t

The trouble I see is in how these GPS based driving systems give directions. Even when the directions are accurate and the pronunciation is good (ha) and the turns are correct, they're completely mechanical. Every turn is given with exactly the same precision and urgency as every other turn. If I were telling you how to get where I'm going this afternoon, I'd start by saying "get on I-5 north". My phone would say "go 50 feet, then take a left onto X, then go 200 feet, then take a right onto Y", and so on. I don't know until 5 seconds before I hit the on-ramp that I'm just supposed to get on the freeway. Worse, often it'll be the case that the instructions are given late enough that if you wait to consider or second-guess them, you'll miss the turn. (And roads are not in general designed to make recovery easy, so missing a turn can add quite a bit of time, especially if it sends you into a tunnel, across a bridge -- or worse, waiting in line for a drawbridge.) There's many places where it will say "take a right ... now take a left", and I've got half a block to get across 4 lanes of traffic. Get moving now! (Lane sweeping is legal in California but nowhere else I know of.) In essence, it's treating me like a computer, and feeding me literal instructions one at a time. It's training me to blindly accept and immediately act on them. It's not surprising that people do. I care less about improving the (comically bad) pronunciation of local names than I do about getting instructions that are phrased like a human being does. "Get on I-5 north -- it's just like you're going to ${other_place_you_go_every_week} but you'll turn right on ${other_street} instead of ${normal_street}." Then there could be a giant button for "Break it down for me -- I need more details".