So we did our Christmas thing again, Denise, Alex, Ed, Jeremy, Ken, Mark and I sat down for our review of the year with a glass or two of wine and a microphone. You can listen to the Geomob podcast Christmas Chaos edition here.
This year there were justifiable claims that some of last year’s predictions were at least partly correct, or they had happened but slower than anticipated, but some were just plain wrong.
Here are our predictions for 2023 so that you can join us in laughing at our lack of foresight when we get to the end of 23.
- Mark Iliffe
- Watch out for the impact of AI in mapping particularly in OSM
- Something will change!
- Hope we are kinder
- Ken Field
- Google release the Pixel 8 and Ken buys it
- Elon Musk will say or do something stupid!
- We will see AI being used to generate thematic maps before topographic maps
- Ken will write his 3rd book
- Jeremy Morley
- We will see the return of Digital Twins
- Ed Parsons
- We’ll see new apps/maps for a digital native audience e.g. Snap which do not follow our classical expectations of mapping
- Denise McKenzie
- Exciting startups coming out of Africa led by under 30’s (Ed agreed)
- More talk about the purpose and reasons for collecting data
- Digital Public Infrastructure
- Alex Wrottesley
- Increased role for geo data in auditing big public projects e.g. remote sensing detecting environmental bad actors
- Return to consensus driven debate in geospatial (a hope or a prediction??)
- Steven Feldman
- The Overture Maps initiative will use OpenStreet Map data as a massive training data set for ML/AI to autocreate high currency topographic maps from remote sensed imagery
- There will be a big row in the OSM community possibly leading to a fork
You can see everyone was hedging their bets with some safe guesses but the truth is that none of us can predict what will happen in 23, we’ll just have to live it and hopefully enjoy it.
Have a good one!
