Better hegemony now available. Tap to accept

[metaphortunate]

I was using Google Navigation today, and as I drove into the city, the robot piped up, "Faster route now available. Tap to accept." This is apparently because Google bought Waze, which does real-time traffic data.

If enough people buy into this, Google will be doing load balancing for our road networks. Holy shit. I mean, holy shit. That is a lot of power for one company to have. And I really hate that I immediately have to think of how bad actors could exploit this, because also, holy shit, what fantastic power! What an elegant way to optimize our cities! How this could help traffic!

And all of this is financed by people on the web paying a dollar a click to try to get me to buy shoes. Capitalism is so weird.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

It is very weird, indeed. And for me, working at Google only makes it more so.

[laurashapiro]

Have you read The Circle by Dave Eggers? It takes all of this to one possible logical conclusion.

[metaphortunate]

Did you like it? I think of Dave Eggers as an alt-bro and am reluctant to read things by him, but that may be unfair.

[laurashapiro]

I am fond of Eggers because he is the founder of McSweeney's and the young writers' nonprofit program that feeds into the Pirate Store, etc. IOW, I think he's done legitimate good for the community. I haven't read many of his books. I like the Circle as a book about ideas; it's a bit thin as a novel, as the characters are there to represent stuff more than to be people, but an interesting page-turner for all that.

[hitchhiker]

i had the same impression, again perhaps unfairly. (but i was also relatively unintrigued by the excerpt of 'the circle' that i read). if you read and like it i will follow suit :)

[thaleia]

This occurred to me the first time they suggested this to me as well:

We could do crazy things like route around preferred bicycle routes!

Smarter accident reports could indicate threshold limits for "problem" intersections and route an appropriate amount of traffic.

However, the fact is that the load on EVERYONE using the same service to make traffic decisions will degrade the service until it perpetuates the creation of alternatives. Either operationally, or when people make short-sighted decisions like "we could get this sandwich shop to pay us to route 1 block over and go past their billboard"

Which kinda sums up a lot of the struggle/debate between free market / and all kinds of government infrastructure.

This is why we can't have NICE things! But I'll keep trying.

[metaphortunate]

This is exactly why we can't have nice things! >:|

And yes. I immediately start worrying about the centralized power, but of course in a crowdsourced system there are opportunities for individuals to misuse/game the system as well!