Picker

Hundreds of millions of people were moving around with telephone calls in parks, cemeteries, pedestrians. They were catching virtual creatures. They were laughing. They took pictures. And millions of them did 1 more thing. They scanned benches, monuments, facades of buildings, due to the fact that the game asked: "Scan this place, you'll get a prize."
And they were scanning.
Not for money. To digital Pikachu.
Saturday. Park.
Phone's out front. Camera aimed at the sculpture by the fountain.
Half a minute walking around the object. It pops up on the screen, "You get a reward."
A bunch of virtual objects.
That half minute was enough.

Niantic was collecting all scan at the time. Location. Camera angle. Time of day. Lighting. Millions of people, millions of prospects of the same place.
Google built Street View for years. car fleet. Hundreds of millions of dollars.
Panoramic from the position of the road.

Niantic built something Google doesn't have.
A three-dimensional map from a pedestrian perspective. To the nearest centimeter.
So far, over a million locations in the world. With a plan for more.
30 billion photos. Not from satellites. Not from drones.
From the phones of people who thought they were catching Pokémons.
Today, this data gives eyes to Coco Robotics' transportation robots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami. GPS in the concrete between the towers is 10 meters away.
A three-dimensional map built from your scans corrects this error.

CEO Niantic Spatial, John Hanke, said: realistic movement of Pikachu in the real planet and safe navigation of the transportation robot is the same problem.
They didn't hide it.
It's in the book. They showed the message on the screen. They made a choice.

Scanning took effort. The player had to approach PokéStop himself, turn on the camera, evidence and send. People did it voluntarily. To a bunch of virtual objects.

But the choice was, "Scan the monument, you'll get a reward in the game."
No: “scan the monument, and you will build a map, after which autonomous robots will be driving in 5 years, and your data will go to AI systems that no 1 has always heard of before.”

Not "did Niantic rob us." He didn't steal. He gave you a choice.

What's worth your choice erstwhile you don't know what you agree to?

Billion downloads. 30 billion photos. A three-dimensional map of the planet, built location after location. By people who just wanted to catch Pikachu.

The top value in the planet of AI is not algorithms.
It's data.
And the most valuable data is the data you give yourself.
For something that doesn't exist.

Leszek Wysocki
@watcher