How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything (The Atlantic)
It’s an interesting article, but too starry-eyed. Here are my thoughts.
- Google Maps still has a long way to go to be as good as “the maps we used to keep folded in our glove compartments”. The challenges to replacing them are huge given those maps’ special purpose and limited extent. No surprise, though, and this fact doesn’t diminish the value of Google Maps. Think about how inferior cellphone quality is today compared to landline, yet the cellphone provides us with enough other benefits that we’re willing to put up with the poor quality of a cellphone connection.
- More important, let’s think for a minute the author’s statement that, “We humans all hold a Borgesian map in our heads of the places we know and we use it to navigate and compute physical space.” Nope, there’s no 1:1 map in my head or yours (unless your name is Dr. Sheldon Cooper). Economists and other (social) scientists make their livings building models and explaining models to people. A map is a model of the world. The reason that models are simple is because our brains are puny. The trick isn’t to get more data (although more data is more better), the trick is deciding how to simplify that data to make it useable. That’s when someone gets a Nobel Prize. That’s when Google makes money.
Hat tip to Dave for pointing to the article.