Google Maps is adding ‘AI-powered’ recommendations to its Maps, Earth and Waze products, according to a somewhat older article on Ars Technica. By including its in-house AI Gemini, Google wants to improve the experience and provide more relevant recommendations to the “2 billion people who use Google Maps every month”.
“A lot of those features that we’ve introduced over the years have been thanks to AI,” said Chris Phillips,VP and general manager of Geo at Google. “Think of features like Lens and maps. When you’re on a street corner, you can lift up your phone and look, and through your camera view, you can actually see we laid places on top of your view. So you can see a business. Is it open? What are the ratings for it? Is it busy? You can even see businesses that are out of your line of sight,”
I think this is interesting because it underscores that the developments of ‘urban AI’ falls within the ‘triple C logics’ of control, capsularization and consumption that I have identified in the past in teksten to most smart city technologies. The big challenge, as I see it with several colleagues, is how to steer this urban AI toward civic urban AI, where citizens are empowered instead of treated as potential suspects, as atomic individualistic particles or as consumers.
It is also interesting because AI is now becoming part of our everyday ’urban interfaces’ that we use to relate to our environments and each other. Even if this were really a case of AI and not just the cool buzzword for preprogrammed algorithmic recommendations, it means that yet another digital layer or stack or infrastructure is added to the way we relate and engage with our physical socio-spatial environments. With corporate AI closely sealed like a tin, can this hybrid interplay becomes even harder to disentangle.
Additionally, our everyday mobility in the city is now leveraged for training Google’s genAI models. We become remote workers in hybrid space for a multi-billion US company.
Laat but not least, I cannot escape the thought that this ‘service’ will in the end do urban societies a disservice, by exacerbating social inequality and divisions through (biassed) algorithmic personalization and recommendation. Algorithmic sorting will become even more pronounced.
Link to original article on Ars >>