Give us better publicly-accessible seafloor maps for that bit of ocean?
>> there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans
> Why? What would be the economic case for doing this?
Immediately? Who knows. He did qualify his statement with an "eventually/100 years," though. I can imagine such robots would be useful for environmental monitoring, mineral prospecting, and defense reasons. Especially if the cost decreases.
IIRC, there already are automated scientific buoys that drift with the currents, do programmed dives, and transmit their measurements by satellite.
Edit: here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider
Edit2: here is a paper about installing mapping sonar in such a vehicle: http://www.physics.mun.ca/~bdeyoung/Zhou_Icebergs_2014.pdf
Gold lost on sunken ships!
What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise?
>there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans
Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Building machines that work at the extreme depths of the sea floor is incredibly hard. The search for a single lost airplane (and it really is just the one, not a single other commercial airliner is unaccounted for) certainly isn't going to fund this pipe dream.