In 50 years, Google...

[rcjordan]

"...will be the self-driving car company (powered by this deep map of the world) and, oh, P.S. they still have a search engine somewhere."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-well-everything/261913/


This struck me as likely to be true.

[thesaintv12]

Should I still be here in 50 years, I will probably be in need of a self driving car...

[ergophobe]

Interesting article. I particular was struck by this observation:

I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company. The secret to this success isn't, as you might expect, Google's facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world.

I think he's right to highlight that. If you've been watching Google since the outset, you probably have, like me, a bias to think of Google as always looking for scalable, algorithmic solutions that require minimal human intelligence and leverage a few smart engineers, an algo and a huge server farm. This shows the degree to which Google has diverged from that model and is willing to take on tasks that are just flat-out labor-intensive (though, ideally, using as much customer labor and as little employee labor as possible).

It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world.

This just makes me thing les of Borges and more of Vernor Vinje's "Rainbows End" novel where everyone is "wearing" and is seeing an overlay of the world all the time, with all sorts of other data overlayed onto it. Effectively, that "augmented reality" is a 1:1 map of the world. Ultimately Google Glasses require a 1:1 map of the world to reach full potential. In fact, I could even imagine a 2:1 map of the world in the same way that I often work on images in 200% of target size.

I don't know if it will be self-driving cars or what. As much as IBM changed over the years, it's first killer app (before it was truly IBM, still called CTR) was punch card processors for the 1900 census. If you're my age, you thought of them originally as a typewriter company, but their true business was always machines that crunched numbers and time.

It could be that if you want to walk down the street and really be able to see what everyone else is seeing, you'll need to be a Google subscriber, whether in your car or on foot, but the self-driving car company will have long spun off while the core business is still about the data.