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Today, Microsoft announced their new traffic system.  Yawn right?  Well, maybe not.  Seems their new system has a trick up its sleeve that other traffic systems, cams or other don’t.

While driving into work, an MS guy thought he’d beat the freeway traffic and hit the city surface streets.  The result?  Predictably, they were worse.  From that came a machine system that “learns”. 

According to Microsoft, their traffic system that will be available from their maps.live.com site, dubbed Clearflow will apply machine learning of complex traffic problems.  They system looks at both highways and surface streets and routes the fastest.  They system claims to learn how long it takes the surface streets to back up once the highway does and computes the time differences.

Analysts fear us common folk won’t understand what MS is doing here and it will be just another route with traffic taken into consideration.

MS is rolling this out for 72 cities across the country.  Note the time and day, this is the dawn of the machines learning how to cripple us: traffic.

Read [New York Times]