Aside from the scanning function, they likely have many geolocated images from people catching pokemon in AR mode.

I remember reading in the news that Pokémon Go was quite popular in Palestine.

If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.

> And now there are detailed locations of our cities.

The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).

It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.

The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.

Kill bots are used right now in Ukraine, including ones with no operator in the loop (too slow)

Optimistically, it sounds like the USA data could be used to assist USA domestic defense drones, fighting against an invading foreign nation.

Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered

Yep, the autocracies of the past only resolved when the ruling machinery needed something from the population. They needed farmers, workers, soldiers, etc.

There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed

A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.

story broke yesterday that Ukraine deployed its first fully AI system, no human interaction, and it scored its first kill

i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.

rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8

No the tech doesn’t work like that AFAIK. The most common use case is exactly localization (think “HD maps” for autonomous cars).

It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.

There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.

Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.

well the article writes AS IF the whole intention was to:

"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)

but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?

well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)

the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet

(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)

anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less

Which of those are active theaters of war? Pokemon Go wasn't that big in Iran or Lebanon and even there, there aren't any reports of significant drones deployed there.

The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).

or ukraine or russia, and ofc people in africa dont have phones or internet -_-.

ofc going by the entire surface of the earth its not a lot of places, but i would never call such a thing statistically insignificant..

This is a good point. Legacy data might be the most valueable here

Good thing we’re not selling this data to the Russians?

"The Middle-east" isn't a war zone. Even the parts of the middle-east that are, don't have any drone deployments. Lebanon maybe? Reports are thin.

Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.

Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.

Obtaining it never means having to scan anything at any time.

"War is a given" if your foreign policies dictate that outcome. It's not something always unavoidable but it isn't inevitable either.

The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.

War is bad. And our reality isn’t some unchanging truth. Our actions and choices, or apathy, help shape our reality.

It is not childish to aspire to be better.

the EU has demonstrated for decades that by balancing trades, equality and human rights it can prevent conflicts from happening.

Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?

War is very much not a given in the civilized world

I guess nuclear weapons were just inevitable the moment the first quarks were assembled into a proton, right?

"war is a given" =/= "we should seek out wars"