Google only has one hammer: the algorithm. It just comes in different colors.
Traffic? Waymo algorithm.
Municipal planning? Smart Cities algorithm.
Advertising? AdSense algorithm.
Journalism? Google News algorithm.
Google, and certain other tech companies, need to learn that not every problem can be solved by a computer.
No that's utterly absurd. What Google builds are platforms, markets and generally scalable systems. They involve algorithms and algorithms may more often than not be their competitive edge but an algorithm does not a system make.
“Computers are useless, they can only give you answers”
All those projects google shuts down? Those were problems they tried to solve but failed to.
What humans (or rather: our governments) don't excel at: accurately using the data that technology gives us. We know that climate change is real, man-made and will fuck up entire continents, but still there are world leaders actively rejecting science.
This is why the Play Store and Chrome Web Store are full of malware, and why human-curated app markets have effectively zero.
On the other hand, that's not such an easy problem for humans to solve either