[Pamar]

From previous articles on "the knowledge" I believe that no, a machine cannot really do "better" or not yet, at least.

IIRC at the exam you could get questions like "The passenger tells you that his cousin mentioned a building with a bas-relief of Holy Mary holding Jesus, it was right around the angle from his hotel, but he does not remember the hotel's name".

You are supposed to know the place and the best way to get there, based on just this (also, a good number of "knowledgeable" taxi drivers go for an official London Tour Guide exam soon after, with relatively little effort, considering they have already memorized thousands of places, monuments and architectural details).

[eru]

Untrained driver + Google Maps sits on a different point on the cost / benefit curve than Driver-with-the-Knowledge.

Different customers might prefer different total packages on different occasions.

I for one rarely need the more expensive Driver-with-the-Knowledge option, especially when I can ask Google many of the same questions.

[Pamar]

I may concede that it can perform “adequately at a lower price point” (I use Google myself when I am not in my hometown), but the parent wasn’t talking about price.

[eru]

I went off the phrase "A machine can indeed do a better job [..]" and was seeing the price as a big part of that package.

Looks we agree about everything that we actually made explicit. The disagreement was about the implicit meaning of whether price was included in the meaning of 'better job'.