Much has been written about Google's self-driving cars. To recap: Google has started publicly demonstrating a car that can drive on public streets all by itself. It's deeply impressive technology, and is a manifestation of a decades-old prediction. Cars that drive themselves! No more congestion! No more accidents! Tomorrow's world today!

Because this technology is still stuck in the lab, demonstrated under carefully controlled conditions, my instincts are to dismiss it as speculation or decades away. But I've learnt that my instincts are basically slaves to my lack of long-term imagination. When I was 14 I read about e-ink and flexible displays. They seemed far-fetched then, but Kindles have been around for years and flexible displays seem just around the corner. Self-driving cars are probably closer than I think.

So how would that affect the tech world? Why would Google bother? Google say it's to advance society, which is probably partially true. But to me, the interesting part is the data. A self-driving car necessarily involves a whole bunch of sensors and cameras. A GPS and internet link are practically a given. So when this technology makes it into commercial vehicles Google's going to have a huge competitive advantage when it comes to maps and local data.

You won't need a dedicated street view team because you can use the imagery from people's cars. 3D maps like Apple's come from laser rangefinders and cameras, both of which will be built in to people's cars. Traffic flow data already comes from people's phones; it's a tiny step to pull it from the car directly. Updating maps with new/missing/altered roads is a similarly small step. As mobile bandwidth increases, the idea of a live streetview might actually be feasible. Scary as hell, but feasible.

This is all obviously good news for Google and good news for Google's users, but mapping competitors should worry. It's not about taking the human out of the process; it's taking the employee out of it. Other companies would have to pay people to gather data that Google's harvesting ambiently.

And now something completely unrelated

For a while I've been trying to figure out how to fit this thought into 140 characters, and failed:

You may think that with iPads and private space travel and drone strikes that we're living in the future. But your washing machine's UI begs to differ.

But trying to get a thought into a tweet can leave it open to misinterpretation. Is it a less-pithy version of "The future's already here, it's just not very evenly distributed"? Did Warren Ellis pre-emptively skewer it? The answer to both questions is "Yes and no."

My intention wasn't to normalise the age we're living in. I was trying to express the concept that some things are mind-blowingly amazing, whereas others remain mundane and niggling. I thought the great promise of the future isn't a few giant things, but a thousand tiny ones. Maybe we're condemned to overlook them; progress itself is a thousand tiny steps rather than one giant leap.

The shape of my life now is radically different compared to my life in 2003. And yet I still have to do my best Egyptologist impression when doing the laundry. A courier can't be more specific about a delivery time than a 12 hour window. I still buy pasta from the supermarket and find 3 unopened packs when I get home.

All I'm saying is there's still some room for improvement.