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Facebook can map more of Earth in a week than we have in history | New Scientist

In a blog post, the social network announced that its AI system took two weeks to build a map that covers 4 per cent of our planet. That’s 14 per cent of Earth’s land surface, with 21.6 million square kilometres of photographs taken from space, digested and traced into a digital representation of the roads, buildings and settlements they show. And Facebook says it can do it better and faster, potentially mapping the entire Earth in less than a week.

This is the starkest example I’ve seen so far of the most important phenomenon in technology – computers doing human work really fast. It’s going to change the way we work forever, and will have massive implications for how we acquire knowledge, cooperate on large projects and even understand the world.

The stated goal of Facebook’s data-science team is to build maps to help the social network plan how to deliver internet to people who are currently offline. It’s a dubious starting point, but whatever you think about Facebook’s internet colonialism, the company’s drones won’t be able to beam Wi-Fi to the disconnected until they know where they are.