No one knows what the next new thing will be, but it’s very likely that there will be one, some technological innovation or legal event that shakes up the Internet again. Microsoft is hedging its bets, in case privacy concerns lead to changes in consumer behavior or regulations that upend the communications-technology industry: it asks users to opt in before it collects GPS traces from mobile phones in order to incorporate that data into its maps. Its many businesses — Windows, Office, Xbox, video games, consulting services, mobile phones and advertising — offer potential hedges against unpredictability as well. Google, on the other hand, depends on a single extremely profitable business — selling advertising — to subsidize the rest of its enterprises. Microsoft is betting that its diversified, conservative approach will enable the company to endure and prosper should Google be brought low.

OpenStreetMap, by contrast, is rushing headlong into Google’s territory. Steve Coast recently showed me the latest innovation: iPhone attachments that look a bit like kazoos or doll-size French horns, made of plastic. “They’re snap-on panoramic lenses,” he said. Coast intends to release an app soon that will enable anyone’s cellphone to function as an open-source version of the Google orb. The resolution of the panoramas it will produce will be nowhere near orb-quality, Coasts conceded, but he claimed that the metric that really matters is the price-quality ratio. “For $60 anyone can have their own Street View vehicle!” He did add, sotto voce, that “the real barrier to entry is that you have to be willing to duct-tape your phone to the top of your car.”

Coast has a related plan for adding more and better aerial imagery to OpenStreetMap: it turns out to be relatively simple for a computer program to transform snapshots taken from a small plane into what look like extremely high-resolution satellite photos. And sometime this month, Planet Labs, a new space-imaging start-up, plans to launch the world’s largest privately owned network of earth-imaging satellites and make all the pictures they take publicly and freely available.

Borges’s story ends with the map of the empire becoming so big that it achieves a scale of one to one, at which point it — along with cartography itself — fades into irrelevance. “In the deserts of the West, still today,” Borges writes in his last line, “there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.”

We’re fast approaching an endgame in which the capacity to read a map could become a lost art. The online-map era started with a flowering: Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com. Foursquare and others took the concept to its logical conclusion. It’s no exaggeration to describe the smartphone as the equivalent of a cursor moving through a one-to-one-scale map of the world. Today, turn-by-turn navigation is the quintessential map app. Already some maps exist as voices that tell you where to go: Turn left, turn right. When cars drive themselves, the map will have been fully absorbed into the machine.

Right now Google has about 25 experimental self-driving cars on public roads in California and Nevada. So far they have driven more than 600,000 miles without being involved in a serious accident. The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there.

In effect, the robot car is not driving through the real world so much as it is moving through, in Borges’s words, “a map of the Empire, whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” When the real world is transformed into a data set, it starts to take on some of the aspects of the virtual.