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 @ariaflame @groxx @geeknik It's not owned by Niantic anymore now. Scopely bought it last year.
@Radgryd @ariaflame @groxx @geeknik Scopely bought Niantic, Niantic Spatial was split off as a different company. All very confusing. Pokémon Go has the Niantic logo on the loading screen, Ingress had the Niantic Spatial logo