Pokémon Go players thought they were catching Pikachus.

They were actually building the nervous system for robot civilization.

500M humans. 30B images. Zero consent forms.

The game was the harvest.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/10/1134099/how-pokemon-go-is-helping-robots-deliver-pizza-on-time/

How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world

Niantic's AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.

MIT Technology Review

@geeknik nah. definitely not like they're implying. that kind of data gets you only coarse positioning, at best useful for verifying that your other SLAM software isn't totally bonkers, as you use the robots themselves to get *actually* fine-grained information.

like the claim that it'll help bots find places to park that are out of the way: that's the opposite of what Pokemon Go has you record, in nearly all cases.

at best they used it to build the tech that *actually* handles world modeling, which is what they're selling. the Go player data is almost completely useless to world model purchasers, except for showing those specific landmarks. great for AR tourism, worthless for robot deliveries.

@groxx @geeknik Similar to Ingress, though they aren't owned by the same people any more.
@ariaflame @groxx @geeknik The article is talking about Niantic Spatial, which *is* the Ingress owner. Pokémon Go is owned by Niantic, now a different company
@bellinghman @groxx @geeknik Ah, I didn't have time to read the article. I should have known it would be misleading. And I can say that the information I upload to ingress is not the sort of thing that would be helpful for food delivering bots.
@ariaflame @groxx @geeknik Pavement scanning? Oh you!
@bellinghman @groxx @geeknik Generally the odd piece of sculpture or sign.
@ariaflame @groxx @geeknik My wife and I are currently in Zagreb - can't think why - and have not scanned anything since we arrived. But riding trams and blasting is fun
@bellinghman @groxx @geeknik To be honest I only really do the scans for the second sunday thing.