Warm Earth, Chilled Speech

Images from Google’s new AlphaEarth platform

More than a decade ago I was working on a book about the impact of data on society. I was obsessed with a maddening and seemingly impossible idea: What if we could track every single piece of data that mattered in the world, and from that data, gain unimaginable insights that would shake us into an entirely new age — the equivalent of moving from Medieval times to the Renaissance?

Of course, I was struggling with this thesis well before AI became mainstream. I knew that the compute and algorithms needed to turn my musings into reality were on the horizon, but I simply could not find a way to realize the concepts I sensed were playing out all around me. I felt like Captain Ahab, madly chasing a spectral leviathan of data. I spent days staring out at the ocean from a rented cottage on the beach, imagining every molecule of water as information dancing across sentient processors. It was about this time that I made an uneasy peace with my ambitions to be the next Gleick or McPhee. Rather than submit to the insanity of the matrix, I abandoned the project, and it has haunted me ever since.

I relate this literary failure to give context to news of an extraordinary project announced this week. Google launched “AlphaEarth Foundations,” an ambitious platform that maps our planet in “unprecedented detail,” integrating “petabytes of Earth observation data to generate a unified data…