I'd anticipate that OSM will get machine vision in the future. Consider that that a typical phone/tablet now has a GPS, camera and decent computing resources. It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and automatically extracts mapping information, ready for uploading to OSM. Begging to the point, where I think it's just a matter of time.
As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? It seems well suited to a geographically distributed database, with each country/area looking after it's own map, and the whole being drawn together by a common markup language. Assembling a global map would be a matter of crawling a network of servers, rather than downloading from a single source.
