This year, before departing on my annual holidays to France, I decided to invest in a GPS system for the car to avoid the inevitable anxieties that arise when trying to read a map whilst driving at high speed down French motorways in a right hand drive car.

And the investment paid off. After punching in my destination on the French Atlantic Coast, the brand spanking new system navigated me accurately across the arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates England from northern France and straight to the doorstep of the hotel.

I was greatly impressed by my ?150 new toy, for each time I wanted to move around the region, the navigation system would take me there effortlessly. And if I ever departed from the beaten track, the GPS system would find an alternative route that would put me back on the right road faster than you could say Jacques Robinson.

And there was something quite reassuring about the way that the GPS delivered its directions too, even though its French pronunciation was worse than mine. It never got angry or upset with me as fellow map readers have done in the past when I have made a wrong turn here and there. No, it just quietly got on with its job, methodically calculating or recalculating routes to guide me wherever I need to go.

One might consider the new gadget and engineering miracle. But perhaps it is only a foretaste of things to come. Because while finding the best route to Fife is one thing, no technology yet exists that can help the individual navigate his way through life.

But imagine if it did. What if a pocket-sized device did exist that could help us make the right choices when we reach those difficult points in our lives when we are unsure of which path to take - be it in our professional or our personal lives.

Clearly, at present, we can never be sure of the outcome of the routes we take in life, or ever know what might have happened if we had made alternative decisions. But what if we could? What if such a navigation system would allow you to make those decisions based on the knowledge of those that had gone before you?

Clearly, developing such a product would be a sizeable engineering challenge. Because of the unique lives that each individual leads, capturing the enormous amount of information that such a system would need would be a task in itself. Not to mention programming it to analyse the data in such a fashion that it would yield meaningful results to the user.

Sadly, I don’t think we are likely to see such a system emerge for at least the next fifty or so years. And by then, I’m afraid to say, I will already have made a lifetimes worth of decisions without any computer aided assistance at all. And whether they were the right ones or the wrong ones, I will never be sure.
This comment was originally published in the Engineeringtalk Newsletter