Google’s Road Map to Global Domination - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-global-domination-dont-ask-why-ask-where.html?pagewanted=a
Google has about 25 experimental self-driving cars on public roads in California and Nevada. So far they have driven more than 600,000 miles without being involved in a serious accident. The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there.
In effect, the robot car is not driving through the real world so much as it is moving through, in Borges’s words, “a map of the Empire, whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” When the real world is transformed into a data set, it starts to take on some of the aspects of the virtual.
Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, has promised to release self-driving technology within four years, and Google’s maps will then be a standard feature in its robot cars. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has promised that Tesla Motors will deliver a self-driving car in three years. It’s too early to know whether Tesla will use O.S.M.’s maps — but the indications are that it will not use Google’s.
The map, at that point, will just be data: a way for our phones, cars and who knows what else to navigate in the real world.
