While there are certainly ethical questions to be dealt with, spatial AI will revolutionize industries by enabling machines to perceive and interact with 3D environments. This will benefit every economic sector, from health care to architecture to e-commerce. With this technology, society can build upon and interact with the physical world unlike ever before.
Spatial intelligence firms like Niantic are much more terrifying than your typical greedy corporation. It's important to remember that Niantic's original company, Keyhole, was reportedly linked to the CIA's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. It is not far-fetched to assume that the US military and national security state are using private firms to track our every move.
Niantic, the creator of the augmented reality (AR) game Pokémon Go, says it has collected over 10M location scans from players to develop a Large Geospatial Model (LGM) for artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
While the company is upfront about the information it collects and doesn't share data with third parties, its privacy policy offers no option to disable tracking—or clarity on how the data is used.