What point were you making? Because the point he seems to be making is that cartography is oppressive because it doesn't account for the sensibilities of the denizens of the land. I don't think he makes that point, though. I think he loses the script. More than that, I think he loses it right here:

That knowledge simply couldn’t be captured on the maps created by voyagers like Captain James Cook, who sought to locate all points of significance on a “static grid of coordinates,” relying on stable coastlines for cartographic reference.

It's right there. Right there to make the argument. Hell, you can see the beginning of the argument here:

Tesla (which, for now, insists that its cars can function without Lidar) has built a “deep” neural network to process vision, sonar, and radar data, which, together, “provide a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously, and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses.”

There's a fundamental tension here - relational cartography vs. absolute cartography. If you look up his Inuit maps you see a tool that is worthless without a known reference point. Same with his Marshall Islands navigational chart - if you don't know which rock you're on, you sure as hell don't know which rock you're going to. Yet this is what the British were fixated on - "how do we figure out where the hell we are in the middle of the deep blue ocean with absolutely no known reference points." That was the point of Harrison's chronometer, which was the point of modern navigation, which is the point of all these hardcore mapping GIS and geospacial projects: Not "where is the road in relation to my house" but "where is the road in relation to the universe."

Waymo gives no fucks if you are aware of their data. They care not a whit as to your relationship to their data points. Theirs is a system for their use which they will happily license to you for a fee. On the other hand, humans experience the world in terms of distance and orientatin from where they are, not from where it is ordered on a grid.

It's an important discussion to have and it's an important field to explore, but it's not a body of knowledge that is much advanced by decrying the computer approach vs. the human approach. Humans are contextual. Machines, by and large, are not - Tesla being the noteworthy exception (for now). The fact that they're the ones with fatalities says a lot, I think.

The author links to this article which is about mapping forests in Borneo and how the indigenous population rejected cartographic traditions. It's worthy of note that the indigenous population in question, the Dayak, live in a constant state of total tribal war. I mean, jesus.

So there's the discussion - context and conflict or universality and totalitarianism. And now I gotta get on a plane.