Daniel O’Donohue, host of the Podcast “MapScaping”, has published a thoughtful short1 article, “Cameras2, GIS, and why tools don’t make you special anymore“:
There was a time when just owning a camera was enough. You were the “photographer” because you had access to the tool. But now? Everyone has a camera in their pocket. And so to stand out, it’s not enough to have the gear — you need taste and the ability to critique the output. You need a vision and a point of view. You probably also need a niche and a brand.
And I think the same thing is starting to happen with GIS.
Daniel’s thinking is that, thanks to AI3, our geospatial tools become (much) easier to access and use:
What do you bring to the table when everyone has the same tools? Because if the answer used to be “I know how to use the tools,” and now the tools use themselves… well, now what?
More than our tools? – Hopefully not only now.
Footnotes
3–4 minutes to read↩︎
The title reminded of a short documentary by The Times about the camera I recently watched: “Death of a Fantastic Machine”.↩︎
Specifically, natural language as a user interface (conversational UI or CUI) powered by large language models (LLMs) and model context protocol (MCP) servers for “agentic” functionality.↩︎