Nobody Wants to Let Google Win the War for Maps All Over Again
It&#x27;s worth stepping back and considering the landscape of self driving.<p>First, the fact that it&#x27;s within reach is amazing. It&#x27;s one of those wierd cases where regular people instinctively put it in the &quot;mars colony&quot; category of futurism while sober insiders had to bring us back to a more optimistic view.<p>Now, there is a lot to worry about in the current landscape of giant tech companies, and this article is another example. But, there are things to awe at too.<p>Having self driving within reach... it&#x27;s a result of massive effort. Amazing technology, and complexes of technology it is built on. This includes the manufacturing technology producing the cheap components.<p>All of this cam from (1) fairly blue sky intiatives (2) with extremely long and uncertain payback periods and (3) tremendous strategic money-where-your-mouths are foresight. When I realized what G where doing with street-view, I thought it was crazy. More a sign of overexuberance and too much money. Turns out, it was en route to maps dominance which was en route to transportation dominance (and phone dominance).<p>IDK if this is unprecedented, but it&#x27;s fairly unrivaled in today&#x27;s world. We don&#x27;t see IBM or Intel, Toyota or McKesson thinking this big or this far. Definitely not banks or money businesses. Not cities or countries, generally.<p>I mean an equivalent in health&#x2F;medicine would be taking the ideas from TED talks. A personalized health revolution. Nanobots or curing death like Aubrey de Grey keeps talking about.<p>I&#x27;m already hearing the &quot;regulations&quot; explanation.  Medicine is restrained by surgeon generals, parliaments and national health setups. I don&#x27;t think that argument holds at this scale. Self driving cars require re-rwriting our transport rules, and probably massive the physical infrastruucture. The technology will have sucked up billions decades before it makes a penny. The guiding idea is that &quot;if we have a true self driving car, the other stuff will sort.&quot; Same applies to medicine. If it&#x27;s better enough, it&#x27;ll take.<p>It&#x27;s hard to peer back and determine of something was inevitable or not, but I suspect self driving wasn&#x27;t. It could have happened (could will happen? tenses are hard) decades later, if not for the fairly outrageous decisions of a small number of people.