Latest news with #MountainRescueEnglandandWales
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Yahoo
AI Chatbots Are Putting Clueless Hikers in Danger, Search and Rescue Groups Warn
Two hikers trying to tackle Unnecessary Mountain near Vancouver, British Columbia, had to call in a rescue team after they stumbled into snow. The pair were only wearing flat-soled sneakers, unaware that the higher altitudes of a mountain range only some 15 degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle might still be snowy in the spring. "We ended up going up there with boots for them," Brent Calkin, leader of the Lions Bay Search and Rescue team, told the Vancouver Sun. "We asked them their boot size and brought up boots and ski poles." It turns out that to plan their ill-fated expedition, the hikers heedlessly followed the advice given to them by Google Maps and the AI chatbot ChatGPT. Now, Calkin and his rescue team are warning that maybe you shouldn't rely on dodgy apps and AI chatbots — a piece of technology known for lying and being wrong all the time — to plan a grueling excursion through the wilderness. "With the amount of information available online, it's really easy for people to get in way over their heads, very quickly," Calkin told the Vancouver Sun. Across the pond, a recent report from Mountain Rescue England and Wales blamed social media and bad navigation apps for a historic surge in rescue teams being called out, the newspaper noted. Stephen Hui, author of the book "105 Hikes," echoed that warning and cautioned that getting reliable information is one of the biggest challenges presented by AI chatbots and apps. With AI in particular, Hui told the Vancouver Sun, it's not always easy to tell if it's giving you outdated information from an obscure source or if it's pulling from a reliable one. From his testing of ChatGPT, Hui wasn't too impressed. Sure, it can give you "decent directions" on the popular trails, he said, but it struggles with the obscure ones. Most of all, AI chatbots struggle with giving you relevant real-time information. "Time of year is a big deal in [British Columbia]," Hui told the Vancouver Sun. "The most sought-after view is the mountain top, but that's really only accessible to hikers from July to October. In winter, people may still be seeking those views and not realize that there's going to be snow." When Calkin tested ChatGPT, he found that a "good input" made a big difference in terms of the quality of the answers he got. Of course, the type of person asking a chatbot for hiking advice probably won't know the right questions to ask. Instead of an AI chatbot, you might, for instance, try asking a human being with experience in the area you're looking at for advice, Calkin suggested, who you can find on indispensable founts of wisdom like Reddit forums and Facebook groups. "Someone might tell you there's a storm coming in this week," Calkin told the Vancouver Sun. "Or I was just up there Wednesday and it looks good. Or you're out of your mind, don't take your six-year-old on that trail." More on AI: Elon Musk's AI Just Went There
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- The Guardian
We now leave navigation to our phones. The result: more of us are getting hopelessly lost
It does not involve protest or violence, but it might be the quintessential human image of our times: a small group of people in the midst of spectacular natural scenery, drawn there in the certainty that the apps on their phones could somehow get them from A to B to C – but utterly, hopelessly lost. Two weeks ago, Mountain Rescue England and Wales published figures showing a record number of annual callouts. For the first time, in fact, teams – of overworked volunteers, mostly – had been called out on every day of the year. Between 2019 and 2024, the total number of rescues had increased by 24%, and there was a marked jump among the 18 to 24 age group, among whom callouts almost doubled. Similar trends were evident in data from Scotland: across Britain, there is evidently a mounting problem about the gap between people's urge to experience wild and open spaces, and their ability to cope when they actually get there. The Guardian's report included an incisive quotation from Mike Park, the chief executive of Mountain Rescue England and Wales, who talked about incidents in the Lake District, Eryri (Snowdonia), Northumberland and other places. 'We know from incident reports that more and more people are tempted into risky locations by Instagram posts and the navigation apps being used aren't always suitable for an outdoor environment,' he said. Whatever people found online either underplayed or completely ignored what he called 'the hazards and context' – or, put more bluntly, the real world. Welcome, then, to yet another version of a familiar story: how seemingly infallible technology turns out to be nothing of the kind. Superficially, digital navigation based on GPS tech seems massively empowering. In most of our everyday environments, that promise usually just about holds true. But it is also quintessentially infantilising, leaving us unable to get around without it, or cope with its shortcomings. Most of us know the horror and panic that comes with sudden battery loss in an unfamiliar place, and that weird sense of being cut adrift from basic skills that human beings have had since they learned to walk upright (if not before). But those hapless souls getting lost up mountains have confronted something even more fear-inducing: that once you are away from roads and built-up environments, many of the most dependable apps suddenly run out of detailed information. When that happens, do we even have the skills any more to find our way back to safety? In 2020, neuroscientists based at McGill University in Montreal published research suggesting that 'people with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation'. Thirteen of their participants were retested three years after the initial research, when they found that 'greater GPS use since initial testing was associated with a steeper decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory'. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that deals with navigation: among London taxi drivers, the need to memorise so many geographical details was found to cause it to increase in size. But here were findings that suggested the opposite: reliance on automated directions reducing people's capacity to navigate for themselves. There is something even more profound and insidious at work here. On our phones, all that really matters is an archetypal blue dot, representing a single individual. As the writer and academic Jerry Brotton puts it in his brilliant book Four Points of the Compass – published last year – this represents 'the most extreme expression of a long history of egocentric mapping'. Anyone familiar with the history of ancient Rome will recall Ptolemy, the mathematician and astronomer who believed that the planets of the solar system, along with the sun, revolved around the Earth. Here is our delusional modern equivalent: a version of reality that puts us at the centre of everything. It also offers no clues about what awaits us further along the route: the journey just unfolds by increments. Worse still, what the most-used navigation apps – Google and Apple maps – most clearly show is the location of shops and restaurants, embodying the sense that, as Brotton puts it, 'what matters most is where we stand and how we consume, often at the expense of an immersive understanding of and interaction with our physical domain'. The result is that 'individuals online can be virtually connected but environmentally detached from the surrounding world, inhabiting a confused realm of spatial illiteracy'. If that can happen even in towns and cities, what hope have we got amid fells, lochs and forests? Wanting to believe you are omniscient while constantly running the risk of accident and disaster might be the basis of the human condition, but the revolution in human thinking caused by the internet seems to have taken it to a surreal new extreme. It is surely telling that amid the endless profusion of apps designed to tell us where we are, how fast or slow our heart is beating and the latest news headlines, the word that seems to constantly crop up in articles about the way we now live is 'disorientation'. In that sense, people's inability to find their way through the physical world reflects our declining skills at navigation more generally – and through information in particular. These are the consequences of the 21st century's insistence that everything must be personalised: it distorts our understanding of the world to the point of near-fiction. And so, at the risk of sounding like someone's dad, to some practical advice. If anyone is thinking of venturing into the wild but unsure of how to avoid disaster, I'd recommend the Ordnance Survey's peerless phone app – which requires a subscription – and a paper map as a back-up, either in the form of the full fold-out version, or a relevant section shown in a reliable guidebook. Always carry a compass. Before you set off, do what the blue dot discourages, and cast your eyes across the whole route, mindful of the aforementioned hazards and context, and what apps underplay or omit: bogs, high streams and rivers, steep gradients. More broadly, we clearly need to talk about improving people's understanding of what the countryside is like up close, and how to get around it – a conversation that might revive interest in the much-mocked subject of geography. Here, perhaps, is the key to reconnecting the world we see on our phones and the one we have to actually deal with. That is the breach that needs to be healed: if it isn't, even more generations will find themselves lost, in every sense of the word. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
16-04-2025
- Telegraph
Social media blamed for record rise in mountain rescue call-outs
Social media and poor-quality navigation apps have been blamed for a record number of call-outs for mountain rescue services, a study suggests. Last year was the first time rescue teams in England and Wales were called out every day of the year. Whereas in pre-pandemic times the most rescued age group was 50-54, today it is the 18- 24-year-olds who are most likely to run into difficulties, partly driven by the craze for selfies at some of the UK's most remote beauty spots. Overall, data from Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW) and visualised by Ordnance Survey revealed a 24 per cent rise in the number of rescues over the last five years – reaching almost 4,000. The service has attributed the change to a growth in the popularity of honeypot locations promoted and shared on social media, as well as younger audiences relying on mobile phone apps that lack the accurate detail required to navigate safely in remote areas. Mike Park, the MREW chief executive, said: 'To say that there wasn't a single day in 2024 without a call-out shows one aspect of how busy mountain rescue teams have been. 'But it's only part of the story. The busiest teams are often seeing multiple call-outs running in parallel with all the demands that puts on unpaid volunteers, their employers, friends and families.' Referencing the change in demographics, Mr Park said: 'It's hard for us to give a definitive reason for the age group change. 'But we know from incident reports that more and more people are tempted into risky locations by Instagram posts and the navigation apps being used aren't always suitable for an outdoor environment. 'Add to that a tendency to follow popular routes online without knowing the hazards and context, and it's not surprising that those likely to be relying most on their phones are the ones getting into difficulties.' The locations with the largest increase in call-outs between 2019 and 2024 were Snowdonia in North Wales, the Lake District and Peak District. The busiest teams were in Llanberis and Ogwen Valley in the Snowdonia National Park.
