ABSTRACT
Many of today’s cartographic innovations arise in order to supply a new technological infrastructure for automated vehicles. Yet as these new artificial intelligences and machinic modes of sensation transform the ways we map – and navigate, police, engineer, and steward—our world, we should be asking ourselves how these technologies might be employed beyond the realm of self-driving cars. Moreover, what modes of perception, what epistemologies and ontologies, are built into these cartographic tools—and what is bracketed out? I argue that map-makers, map theorists, designers, technologists, and policymakers must recognize mapping’s other “intelligent agents”—including indigenous and local communities, and even other species—because they, too, are invested in the condition of our shared cartographic terrain.
