When Maps Make Decisions: Mobile AI,Navigation Apps,and the Mobilization of Mobile Data

Abstract

Contemporary maps are creatures of “mobile AI,” the linkage of machine learning with communication and mobility, which we now think of as a significant “next phase” of digital communication. In this article, we address this AI-driven “next phase” by examining the current AI-facilitated developments that are reshaping mobile maps and navigational apps. We consider how AI tools are changing the maps that we have (how maps are made), how we interact with mobile maps and navigation services (how maps are used), and their purposes (what maps are doing). By analyzing mobile maps at the intersection of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), platformization, and mobile AI, this article shows how the automation of navigation reorganizes everyday mobility, redistributes decision-making, and generates new political, economic, and social questions. Mobile maps offer a particularly revealing case for understanding how AI is being embedded into mobile media, how value is extracted from movement, and how infrastructural decisions are increasingly delegated to platform systems.