MIT's new A.I. could help map the roads Google hasn't gotten to yet

Google Maps is a triumph of artificial intelligence in action, with the ability to guide us from one place to another using some impressive machine learning technology. But while the routing part of Google Maps doesn't need too many humans in the mix, manually tracing the roads on the aerial images to make them machine usable is incredibly time-consuming and mundane. As a result, even with thousands of hours spent on this task, Google employees still haven't managed to map the majority of the 20 million-plus miles of roadways that stretch around the world. Fortunately, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) may have come up with a solution. They developed an automated method to build roadmaps which is 45 percent more accurate than existing methods.