> Over the course of a year, Google quietly turned its map inside-out – transforming it from a road map into a place map.
I've long been amazed how we somehow transitioned during the early 20th century from a mental model of roads and paths running through locations to places (house lots, etc) being the spaces between the roads. It's a natural thing to happen, but one of those invisible flips that happens on a timescale longer than a human lifetime.
But this anticipates the opposite: if you can stop worrying about how to get somewhere (because you don't have to drive or plan much -- self-driving or Lyft-style services can take care of the route planning) you can focus on the destination.
We see this phenomenon in subway maps which are famously schematic and not geographical.
(BTW the transformation is visible in literature, which is how I noticed it. The sense of geography in, say, Jane Austin is completely alien to today).