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From Pokémon to Palestine: How Your Gaming Data Powers Israel’s Genocide

Crypto Cranium – The Muslim Skeptic

Among the different forms of entertainment that have sprung forth in the wake of modern technologies, video games have been at the forefront. Many of these games are aimed towards the male consumer, primarily because they offer men the ‘fix’ they crave for performing challenging tasks and overcoming obstacles while accruing achievements and also gaining a sense of victory, all within in a safe, easy, and artificial way.

But what if I told you that the datasets from these artificial achievements were being used by the military industrial complex to train drones and robots for combat in the real world and contributing to ongoing genocides against Muslims?

And what if I told you that, for this very reason, Big Tech is quietly on the verge of solving an issue that will bring us that much closer to humans being completely replaced by AI?

Pokémon Go Data Used to Train AI Delivery Robots

Ten years ago, a game called Pokémon Go was launched and had immediately become a global sensation, with hundreds of millions of users. The premise of the game was simple. You use your phone’s camera to find virtual Pokémon characters embedded in all sorts of locations within the real world via AR (augmented reality), and you ‘capture’ them by scanning them and, by extension, their background and surroundings.

For those who aren’t aware, AR is basically a technology that is used to overlay digital content onto the real world. This digital content can be viewed via virtual media such as screens and VR glasses. So, the players of this game had to physically travel to various different locations in order to find the digital Pokémon hidden in the real world. They would then scan them via the cameras on their phones.

What these users didn’t know, however, was that all of the data and images accumulated by the players was collected and used to train robots:

Reportedly, these Pokémon Go scans generated a dataset of more than 30 billion images. Each scan captured not only visuals but also metadata, including GPS coordinates, camera angles, and device movement. Aggregated across millions of players, this information forms a detailed 3D map of streets, buildings, and public areas.

Niantic’s AI spinoff, Niantic Spatial, is now utilising this data set to create a “Visual Positioning System”. Unlike GPS, which is not always accurate in densely populated cities, this system works by matching the live feed of the cameras with the data set of the images.

This is now being utilised by Coco Robotics. Their robots, which roam the sidewalks of cities across the US and Europe, utilise multiple cameras to compare the environment with the data set of Niantic Spatial.

So, there were millions of people playing this game without realizing that they were actually acting as proxy data collectors for not only these corporations but also – as we shall see – the CIA and even the Israeli military.

This VPS technology, according to Niantic itself, is described as follows:

Visual Positioning Systems (VPS) represent a paradigm shift in location technology, going beyond the limitations of traditional GPS. Unlike satellite-dependent GPS, VPS utilizes cameras and visual data to establish position and orientation with unprecedented accuracy—often within centimeters rather than meters.

Basically, VPS is supposed to be the successor to GPS, with its location tech being far superior in comparison. And selling data from unsuspecting customers to train robots on it has raised eyebrows regarding how this tech could be used to train military drones. Well, such concerns have only been raised by us common people. Genocidal militaries just can’t wait to get their hands on it:

During the event, Nick Waters, a former British Army officer and current analyst, highlighted how useful the LGM could be for military applications. He questioned whether Niantic envisioned selling its technology to governments or armed forces, as per the 404 Media report McClendon admitted that such sales were conceivable but clarified that ethical considerations would play a crucial role. If the technology’s use aligns with consumer applications, it might be acceptable, but if it amplifies military operations, that would raise significant concerns.

Ethical? Yeah right…

You see, Coco Robotics isn’t just some harmless AI delivery robot company that makes cute and fun little delivery robots. In fact, it is very much connected to the US-Israel military industrial complex, and there should be no doubt that Coco Robotics, using Niantic’s VPS data, will be used to help train Israeli drones to kill Palestinians with almost perfect precision.

How Niantic Is a CIA-Backed Military Project

Let’s start from the very beginning: Niantic, i.e., the company that made Pokémon Go.

This company was formerly known as Keyhole, and Keyhole was made by none other than the CIA, to develop military tech for the US:

Niantic was initially formed as Keyhole Inc by John Hanke in 2001 with backing from the CIA’s tech venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. The company developed mapping technologies used by the US military in the early 2000s.

Keyhole Inc was acquired by Google in 2004, and was instrumental the development of Google Maps. In 2010, Keyhole was rebranded as Niantic and focused on games. It stayed part of Google until 2015, when it became an independent company again.

So, the company that provided Coco Robotics with the data to train its robots on, is actually a CIA project. Once again, the implication that people all over the world unknowingly acted as data collectors on behalf of the CIA is quite unsettling, to say the least.

And it is highly likely that this is not the only instance of this happening. With how much influence the US government has on our daily lives, especially our time spent online, one can only wonder just how many CIA projects we’re involved in, where they collect vast amounts of data from us like productive lab rats.

Perhaps many of those instances when we’ve quickly clicked ‘Agree’ on a ‘Terms and Conditions’ prompt, without actually reading through anything, we’ve unknowingly entered into a contract with the CIA and allowed them to use our data as they see fit. If that is indeed the case, then many of us are basically unpaid CIA employees at this point.

Let us now take a look at Coco Robotics.

The Coco Robotics Genocide Pipeline

To start off, one of the investors in Coco Robotics is Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has also invested in extremely dubious companies. These companies include Palantir and Anduril, both of which have directly participated, not just in the Palestinian genocide but also in the war against Iran by developing weapons technologies for the US-Israel military complex:

Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Palantir’s AI systems, which draw in part on large language model technology, were used to identify targets. (Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, said he “can’t go into specifics” when asked about this on CNBC, but said that Claude was still integrated into Palantir’s systems used in the Iran war.) Brad Cooper, head of the US Central Command, has boasted that the military is using AI in Iran to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” in order to “make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react”.

[…]

Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey and staffed heavily with former US defense officials, builds autonomous weapons systems explicitly designed for lethal targeting. OpenAI, which until recently prohibited military use in its terms of service, quietly removed that restriction in early 2024 and has since pursued Pentagon contracts. These are among the most valuable companies in the world, with consumer products used by hundreds of millions of people, university research partnerships, and significant political influence in Washington, Brussels and beyond.

One of the associates of Founders Fund, Koren Gilbai, even served in Israel’s IDF cybersecurity units.

Why is an investment group that is so deeply entwined with the US-Israel regime funding a ‘harmless’ delivery robot company? And yes, for those who might have noticed, OpenAI has given up its ethical façade and its promises to not let its AI be used for military purposes, and they are now openly signing contracts with the Pentagon.

And as it just so happens, Coco Robotics wasn’t doing too well in its early years. It was just another tech start-up by college graduates, until it strangely secured an $80 million investment from Sam Altman (among others) and a partnership with OpenAI. Are we supposed to believe that this huge benefaction came with absolutely zero strings attached? Really? And from yet another company that has since been partnering publicly with a genocidal regime?

Historically, Silicon Valley has always been associated with the US military, and today it seems like the entire AI market in Silicon Valley is a giant military tech corporation receiving endless funds and blank cheques straight from the Pentagon.

One Step Closer to Replacing Humans

One of the obvious implications of this tech is that drones and robots can be fitted with tech that allows them to navigate any location with extreme precision, to the point that they can get it right within mere centimeters. This was one of the logistical issues that prevented AI bots from completely replacing humans.

Now, robots can easily deliver products straight to people’s homes without making positional errors, and it’s just a matter of time until they’re able to do it with adequate speed. If they’re faster and more accurate than human deliverers, their demand will increase significantly, and companies looking to profit can easily lay off their human workers and increase their margins by buying a bunch of shiny new robots.

Instead of paying people’s wages, they’ll spend a fraction of that on robot maintenance.

But this won’t only impact delivery systems. This technology gives robots the ability to move freely and accurately in factories, homes, markets, streets, etc. This would mean any job that involves moving around a lot can be replaced with AI, all thanks to VPS technology.

A robot can walk a dog down the street, or it can go to the store to buy you something. Obviously, it will start off with just rich people who can afford to throw a bunch of money at any new gadget that comes along.

Even self-driving cars are a closer to being a reality now, because if VPS is indeed the successor to GPS, then an advancement in positioning technology will mean a shorter timeline until self-driving cars can be trusted to roam the streets.

And the company that made VPS (then known as Keyhole) also helped in the development of Google Maps, so we shouldn’t underestimate its ability to develop world-impacting technologies.

How to Counter VPS Technology?

Let’s assume that the US military is actually successful in its endeavour to create an army of drones and robots that can perfectly navigate their way through enemy regions via VPS. How could opposing armies resist against this?

Well, there are many creative ways that such a problem could be solved. However, unless they’re tested, there’s no way to know their effectiveness for sure. For instance, these robots rely on visual data that they receive through cameras. Remember, the data that Coco Robotics robots were trained on came from 30 billion images.

The AI integrated within these robots match the real-time visual data they are receiving with the reference data they already have to establish their position and surroundings. So, in order to throw them off, perhaps one could confuse and disrupt this visual system.

For instance, these robots are probably smart enough to identify a tunnel. However, are they smart enough to identify an intricate drawing of a tunnel on the side of a wall?

Let’s say an artist makes a realistic painting of a tunnel on the side of a building. A VPS-fitted drone that encounters this will use the visual data and see what looks exactly like a tunnel, and that data will be matched to actual images of tunnels that it has in its reference data. Thus, it will end up concluding that what it sees is not a wall but a tunnel, causing it to crash into the wall and neutralize itself.

Using this logic, such drones and robots can be disrupted and tricked in a variety of ways. They can even be captured, with the purpose of studying them in order to build one’s own army of drones and robots or to find even more vulnerabilities and weak points within them.

Continuing with the deceptive paintings idea, graffiti artists could be employed to create visual illusions that also throw these drones off. For instance, you may have seen all kinds of depth perception illusions on the Internet, where two objects that are the same size appear different due to the way certain lines are drawn.

In this way, objects can be made to appear further away than they actually are, causing the drones to crash. Perhaps jarring paradoxical visual illusions that make the drones short-circuit can be used too.

A row of human children could be painted on certain walls with the purpose of luring drones and robots that have been programmed to shoot children on sight. They can thus be easily trapped or destroyed.

And if you think that using ‘paintings’ in an actual battlefield scenario sounds unrealistic and useless, bear in mind that the concept of Iran using painted decoys to trick the US into wasting billions in drone and missile attacks went viral during the Iran-US-Israel war. And even if the whole thing was just AI, the idea was convincingly realistic and clever enough to make many prominent news outlets believe it actually happened.

Other ideas include disrupting the cameras, thereby disabling the drones and robots by preventing them from collecting any visual information. They will probably be built to resist artillery damage, so if it proves difficult to take them down with conventional fire, other methods can be used, such as coating them with opaque sticky liquids that block visual input.

Or how about using acid-based weapons that can corrode and melt away their metallic framework?

And finally, my favourite idea of all: cyberwarfare. Muslim countries with strong militaries like Iran and Pakistan really need to invest in advancing their cyberwarfare departments. They need to nurture an army of highly skilled ‘Cyber-Jihadis’ that can hack their way deep into enemy software and infrastructure. This could be used to leave the enemy completely blind and helpless, and it could also be used to turn their own weapons against them.

In the next article, we will – in sha’ Allah – discuss how Pokémon Go is not the only videogame that the CIA has their hands in, as well as just how deeply US military propaganda pervades the modern gaming industry.