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.
technologyreview.com/2026/03/1…
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.Will Douglas Heaven (MIT Technology Review)
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Aral Balkan
in reply to geeknik • • •Gosh, I wish folks had warned us about this stuff… oh, I don’t know… maybe a decade ago?
youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&…
#peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism
- YouTube
www.youtube.comAral Balkan reshared this.
Rokosun
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •You were so ahead of your time man, that speech is amazing!
Aral Balkan
in reply to Rokosun • • •@futureisfoss Thank you for the kind words but there’s scant solice in being right about this stuff and even less so in seeing your words fall on deaf ears all this time.
(Hence why I no longer speak about the problem but I’ve been working on creating one possible solution in the form of the Small Web.)
💕
Baron Vonskinnback
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •