What is it about google that causes people to throw all of their thinking ability out the window?
This isn't some conspiracy to inundate you with ads, this has nothing to do with building "crawlers" for meatspace (seriously?).
This is a multi billions dollar industry that is potentially as large as google is on the internet, but in "meatspace".
This is as disruptive as google was to the internet, probably moreso. Actually, almost certainly moreso. Our ties to automobiles dictate the way cities are built, and the way that we interact with our environment.
Gee whiz, google employs an absolute shitload of brilliant engineers and encourages them to work on side projects. It appears that some of them have built something.
NO NO! Must be some alterior motive! Couldn't be that google is a business, and this is a viable revenue stream for them!
I see your point about the tone, but it's true that widespread adoption of such technology would yield interesting new technology for Google too. As a simple example, shifting traffic patterns are a useful leading indicator of economic change at a very high resolution. You can get a lot of statistically useful data from a surprisingly small sample size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination). Consider, for example, the length of time cars spend in the parking lot at a shopping center. When you have that for hundreds of individual cars per day and/or longitudinally (over repeat visits) you can infer an awful lot of data about the local business climate in a non-intrusive way. Even if you make the cars wholly autonomous and don't collect data on individuals there's still a lot of environmental data that can be usefully harvested.
This isn't some conspiracy to inundate you with ads, this has nothing to do with building "crawlers" for meatspace (seriously?).
This is a multi billions dollar industry that is potentially as large as google is on the internet, but in "meatspace".
This is as disruptive as google was to the internet, probably moreso. Actually, almost certainly moreso. Our ties to automobiles dictate the way cities are built, and the way that we interact with our environment.
Gee whiz, google employs an absolute shitload of brilliant engineers and encourages them to work on side projects. It appears that some of them have built something.
NO NO! Must be some alterior motive! Couldn't be that google is a business, and this is a viable revenue stream for them!