veen, am_Unition - I enjoyed your conversation greatly. It's interesting the perspective you both bring to it; I gave up on The Age of Context halfway today so I come at it from the perspective of someone who has had "the Internet of Things" shoved down their throat for a day and a half.

Veen - you need to do your thesis on this. You could even get a book out of it. There's some serious implications in the key statement here:

The key to Google's success has been that these cars aren't forced to process an entire scene from scratch. Instead, their teams travel and map each road that the car will travel.

This is huge and kind of chilling: it implies an "Apple Maps"-grade controversy involving heavy equipment. Consider:

1) An autonomous car using Google's system is at least partially dependent on the quality of a proprietary, licensed dataset.

2) The performance of an extant autonomous vehicle is subject to change based on the licensing in place between the dataset provider and the vehicle manufacturer.

3) The accessibility of a region is dependent on the priority assigned to it by a proprietary, financially-motivated vendor.

Imagine Ford comes out with an autonomous vehicle using Google's dataset. Maybe two years later Germany gets into a dust-up with Google over data privacy. Google could retaliate against Germany by downgrading or removing their German dataset - unless Ford has an agreement with Google, in which case Germany could retaliate against Ford. The legal snarl evolves pretty quickly regardless of the rules on the ground.

Imagine a private community doesn't want Google Streetview in their development for privacy concerns. Google doesn't map their neighborhood for use with autonomous vehicles. A blind man in another part of town sues the entire development for millions of dollars for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act - after all, the community is preventing him from driving there as autonomous vehicles are an approved assistive device (theoretically). Does privacy trump access?

Imagine Audi strikes an deal with Facebook to exclusively use Facebook apps in all its cars. This includes updating all previous Audis from Google Autodrive to Facebook Freedom™. Google argues in court that all Audis from 2015-2022 were qualified as autonomous as a complete system using the Google dataset and that Facebook has not qualified existing Audis with their dataset, thereby requiring a new round of NTSB testing. Facebook countersues but Google gets a temporary injunction - in 9387 of 18433 municipalities. Each one of those municipalities faces different pressures from irate Audi owners that are suddenly forced to pay attention during their entire hour-and-a-half commutes - time they had not considered when they purchased their McMansions 30 miles from their work. How many of them are going to sue? Are they going to sue Audi? Facebook? Google?

We're looking at a potential future in which basic access to transportation might very well be contingent on the proprietary products of large corporations. It's much bigger than GPS or no GPS, I think - the fortunes of a community suddenly become dependent on how well they've integrated with their proprietary overlords (and don't for a minute think Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, anybody wouldn't charge Podunk, MS through the nose for "premium" autonomous data). And, just as with maps, Google's got a head start to the top of the mountain. Regulations will, most likely, be years behind - how far up the legal ladder will the lawsuit have to go before guilt is assigned in the case of Jon Smith, who died in a tragic fireball because Flatbush NJ allegedly moved a traffic signal without notifying Google and Apple?

In the US, at least, we have a Supreme Court that thinks HBO is broadcast over the air. Expecting a nuanced understanding of machine vision, GIS, LIDAR limitations in fog and the value of a pothole map is a pathway to disappointment. I can't think of any other public/private system in which the interplay between a large, financially-motivated monopoly and a basic human right is so primed for strain. The potential implications are, to my mind at least, staggering.