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so it's 2 am and you're walking home for a not very sober Night Out in a foreign city you whip out Google Maps and start walking back to your Airbnb but you soon realize that the area where Maps let you is not safe at all there's catchy people
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around you and someone starts following you and it's at that point that you wonder why is Google or Apple Maps not telling me we're unsafe for crime-ridden areas are do not follow maps to bury
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treasure and X never ever marks the spot in 2016 Two Italian tourists were driving their motorbikes in Rio de Janeiro when they're mapping up LED them directly into a dangerous Favela where they got shot by a local gang so why
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can't Google or Apple with their petabytes of data Advanced Ai and thousands of very well paid designers and Engineers figure this out and what better way to figure this out than to try and actually build the actual
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solution so congratulations you are now the head of Google Maps and you start from your first release version 1.0 okay so for our V1 let's start with the most straightforward solution let's
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simply slap an overlay on the map with the areas that are not safe and Route people away from these areas when they enable navigation easy enough well now your engineers come to you and they ask you hey how do we calculate which areas
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are actually dangerous so you'll start to think well crime records for the most parts are public and they're made available from police departments and governments so we can just take the neighborhoods with the highest concentration and now yeah just go build
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it our feature is ready so you open the app and oh all the city center in the major cities are now flagged as dangerous areas it is quite normal for an area with a high number of people
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living in it and tourists working around to have a higher crime count and this can also range from Big pocketers to murders so it's probably not very useful data either and so your mapping application is now spreading Panic with
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people around the world opening up their app to find themselves in a place marked as dangerous okay so let's start the thing you could take into account the population data and show deviations from the average but hey wait a second you
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have billions of users so why don't we use some crowdsourcing wage is already doing that for speed traps and Road dangers so why not you ask your team to put together this crowdsourcing solution
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and now it's time for v2 okay so now users can report when they see something sketchy or where they feel unsafe then we also have a new map which uses the new data to show hotspots where people have been reporting issues we're also
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starting to get some feedback from users that we're able to avoid dangerous situations so good problem solved well not so fast as people start to use your new feature complaints starts to Pile in
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more and more and more restaurants and Shop owners are complaining that people are being driven away from their stores and that sales are going down residents of areas with higher reported crimes are also feeling discriminated because now
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everybody can see that their neighborhood has been marked as dangers congratulations you've put the company in the center one of the biggest ethical controversies ever you are discriminating hundreds of thousands or even millions of people that live in
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high risk areas and sentiments towards Google Maps is also plummeting as people that were opening the app to discover a new restaurants to eat in are now greeted with the latest assault nearby good job well all of this is happening
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because you haven't realized the immense power test mapling applications hold they are the closest digital link to the real world and while a change in the YouTube algorithm might affect how much Mr Beast turns in a year your mapping
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application literally influences where millions of people go every day it's can completely change social dynamics in some areas and the flow of Tourism and travel pushing discrimination inequality
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even further and significantly affecting people's lives okay so after days of intense brainstorming you decided the best solution is to make the safety score map not visible to users this will
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now be a closely guarded secret and the way you are going to alert people of the dangerous situation is through notifications while they are close to a dangerous area or with a notice when they choose their navigation routes so you tell your engineers to go build this
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and now you get to Be Free Your solution is starting to get big you get tens of thousands of crowdsources reports every day and you start to realize that people are gaming the system pranksters are spamming the system with fake danger
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alerts online marketplaces pop up where you can pay to get multiple people to go to the place and flag it as dangerous to drive customers away from a rival business for example moderation is the biggest problem of any kind of
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crowdsource data so you finally decide to enjoy use some artificial intelligence in the mix with AI you can look at the data that is bringing crowdsource identify patterns of what an actual situation of danger looks like and train the AI model predictions with
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the actual crime reports so your solution starts to get actually good at identifying dangerous situations and now governments and police forces want in and you debate Sparks over why should a private company control key data
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regarding her safety and it's not making it available to everyone and wow this is getting really complex really fast okay so let's recap what you have achieved as head of Google Maps trying to implement this new feature starting with the
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positives yeah you actually have helped some people you've put them out of potentially risky situations and also certainly save some lives or some trips to the hospital in the process at the same time you have created a huge ethical problems by discriminating
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against certain areas that are more crime heavy driving people and tourism away from them and affecting local businesses which make a situation even worse and real estate values of those areas are plummeting your whole app is
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now our cost and source of anxiety for hundreds of millions of people constantly getting notified about anything dangerous happening around them and your app has turned from helpful to dreaded and you've put yourself at the center of any possible controversy media
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backlash and government scooting now this is of course a hypothetical scenario of what could play out and I'm sure engineers and designers and product managers at Google and apple could come up with way better solution than this YouTube video but the reality is that
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behind what seems to be such an obvious product change your feature something they seems so obvious to us like so many complexities that even larger companies like Google and apple decide to just pass on if you know of another feature
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that seems so obvious to implements that I can break down leave a comment below and I'll see you in the next one
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