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The Vanishing ā How AI Is Mapping History Out of Existence
It starts subtly. A parcel map is generated with stunning efficiency. A sleek interface displays terrain data, boundary lines, structuresāall perfectly digitized. But somethingās missing.
A shaded grove that held an unmarked cemetery.
A long-forgotten footpath carved by generations of Indigenous families.
A stone wall no longer visible from the air, but tied to a land dispute a hundred years old.
Gone. Not because they were disproven or deemed irrelevantābut because the algorithm never knew they existed.
Welcome to the quiet crisis unfolding at the edge of progress: AI is erasing historyānot out of malice, but out of ignorance. And itās happening at scale.
Modern AI-powered mapping tools are impressive. They can parse satellite imagery, process LiDAR scans, detect surface features, and overlay parcel data in seconds. But they have one critical flaw: they only see whatās been recordedāand what fits their training set. That mea
