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by being one of the first 200 to sign up at brilliant.org/HAI. If you’re from San Francisco there’s a
few things you’ve probably never heard of: toast without avocados, three figure rent,
republicans, and the East Cut neighborhood. If you go on Google Maps though and search
for East Cut it’ll tell you that’s this neighborhood between Market Street and the
Bay Bridge even though, before a year ago, nobody had even tried to call this area the
East Cut. Nowadays, however, the “East Cut” name
is seeping into the real world all thanks to the world’s benevolent dictator—Google. Now of course Google is amazing and lovely
and I don’t mean to be critical at all of such a fantastic organization but they do
have a certain amount of power over, well, everything. More than half of the world’s smartphone
users have used Google Maps in the past month and, considering that there are 2.5 billion
smartphone users in the world, that’s a lot. Google Maps is the most popular mapping service
in the world and that means that when someone wants to figure out what something is, they
check Google Maps. Quite bafflingly, the benevolent dictator
almost almost started a war in 2010. You see, where Nicaragua and Costa Rica meet
on the Atlantic Ocean Nicaragua believes the border to be this while Costa Rica believes
it to be this. In 2010 a Nicaraguan military troop was sent
to the area to do dredging work on the San Juan River. While there, though, the troop just happened
to meander onto Calero Island which, as far as Costa Rica was concerned, was Costa Rica. Now, having a foreign military strut into
your country with no prior warning doesn’t look great. It looks a whole lot like an invasion so Costa
Rica, being, interestingly, the most populous country in the world without a military, sent
70 police officers to make sure that this wasn’t the beginning of the Nicaraguan annexation
of Costa Rica. In response, Nicaragua sent an additional
50 troops and the two parties sort of just had a stand off while the two country’s
leaders had a discussion. As it turned out, the few dozen troops that
entered Costa Rica had no intentions to singlehandedly overthrow a country of five million. Their commander was just using Google Maps
to navigate which showed the border as this. Costa Rica then went to the International
Court of Justice, and complained and then, after years of back and forth, the court ruled
that this area was in fact Costa Rica and so now Google Maps shows it as Costa Rica
and Nicaragua lays off the invasions. Unfortunately Apple missed the opportunity
to create a great Apple Maps ad. Google Maps does try more or less to follow
what people say places are but sometimes some people disagree on what a thing is. For example, some say New Zealand, other say
“where?” Some say Machias Seal Island is part of Canada,
other say it’s part of the US so if you search it on Google it won’t tell you which
country it is like it does for the rest of the US or Canada. It’ll do the same if you look at a town
in Western Sahara, Kashmir, the South China Sea, or any other disputed territory. But perhaps the biggest issue for Google Maps
is what to call neighborhoods. You see, in most cases, neighborhood names
aren’t official—they’re just decided through what people colloquially call places. People just refer to this area in San Francisco
as Russian Hill or this area Telegraph Hill, this area Jackson Hill, and at least a few
people call this area the East Cut. In 2015, you see, an organization was founded
to improve what was then called Rincon Hill. For some inexplicable reason they decided
they needed a rebranding and they settled on the neighborhood name “the East Cut.” They updated street signs and their website
and everything but still, when asked, the mayor of San Francisco said he had never heard
of the neighborhood. Lucky for the East Cut organization, one of
their board members just happened to work at Google, whose offices are in the East Cut,
and, according to the New York Times in an article about this debacle, was able to persuade
the company to switch the name which is the most San Francisco story ever. Some neighborhood names on Google Maps are
even more baffling, though. In Detroit Google Maps refers to this area
as “the Eye” even though really nobody has ever referred to this area by that name. A blogger did some detective work and was
able to figure out that Google Maps copied the neighborhood names from a map that some
random website published in 2003. Google Maps even copied the misspellings from
that map. As it turns out, “the Eye” was the name
of a community watch organization in the area so there were signs around the area saying
“the Eye” and somewhere along the line someone got confused and assumed it was the
neighborhood name. Still today that name shows up on Google Maps
and, if you really want, you can search and buy real estate in the prestigious Eye neighborhood. In true Detroit fashion, houses start at $8,000. Nobody’s really sure exactly how Google
determines neighborhood names but, once they do, that name essentially becomes official. According to Google Maps Machias Seal island
is both Canada and the US at the same time but you know what’s also two things at once—Quantum
objects since, thanks to Quantum superposition, these particles can be in two or more quantum
states at the same time. This is what Schrodinger’s Cat is about—it’s
like if a cat was both dead and alive at the same time. Quantum mechanics is like magic that’s happening
in our world right now and it’s sort of complicated but Brilliant is the expert in
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