The turns that the app has taken. It used to be the street map of your whole life, the one that took you there without asking. Now they’ve shoved Gemini into it with a shoehorn and it seems like it’s at a trade fair. It wants to be your friend, recommend you a “cozy” spot for dinner, and the reality is that many times it sends you to the wrong place or makes up a business that doesn’t exist .
I’ve already seen it with my colleagues. The other day one of them looked for a mechanic’s shop on the map, got one with great reviews, and it turned out to be an empty lot. AI, in its eagerness to always answer, hallucinates data where there is none, especially if you live outside a big city . I swear it inspires more fear than trust.
And then there’s the circus of fake reports. There were plenty of clever ones who reported fake accidents to divert traffic so they could drive more freely. Google says it now uses AI to hunt down those pranksters, cross-referencing data with speed sensors . But come on, if the machine already makes mistakes on its own, imagine when humans feed it lies on top of that. It’s the dog chasing its own tail.
What bugs me the most is that they’ve turned the app into a salesman that never stops bringing up conversation topics. It’s no longer just “go here,” now it asks you: “Looking for a plan for today?” . And you just wanted to know if the pharmacy on the corner was open. It throws a ton of options and suggestions at you that you didn’t ask for, all so you’ll give it more data and they’ll know even more about you .
To top it off, the other day Google’s entire system went down and we were left stranded, literally . With how lost people already are without looking at their phones, when Maps fails it’s the apocalypse. We depend so much on this digital circus that when the AI decides to go on strike, we don’t even know how to get home.
I mean, it’s also true that they’re trying to fix the mess. They’ve rolled out a feature so you can edit map information by talking to a chatbot, as if correcting the machine were part of the game . And they promise they’ll be more accurate with lanes and traffic lights so there won’t be confusion . But come on, it’s a bit like “I fix what I broke with more of the same.”
I think the business is no longer about getting you to the right place. The business is getting you to talk to it, to tell it your plans so Gemini can serve up more personalized ads. I’d take the silent map from before a thousand times over, where if it made a mistake it was because the street map hadn’t been updated, not because an artificial intelligence was inventing a restaurant for me where there used to be a kiosk.
