Our old friend Spot the robotic dog is signing up with the Big Apple’s police force. New York City mayor Eric Adams announced that the New York Police Department will be getting some brand-new semi-autonomous robotic dogs in the coming weeks. The relocation comes almost precisely 2 years after the NYPD stopped its very first address utilizing a camera-carrying robotic dog for monitoring, after an enormous public outcry; people felt it was a dystopian overreach of cops power. Now Adams, a previous NYPD captain, is moving the program forward once again.
The NYPD says it will get 2 of Boston Dynamic’s questionable Spot bots. While the robotic dogs have self-governing abilities, the NYPD says these systems won’t be patrolling the streets on their own right now. Instead, the robodogs will be deployed in specific instances where the danger for humans is high, much like the bomb-squad robots the department already uses. Each Spot will cost about $75,000, with the cameras and sensors attached to their bodies costing extra.
Spot is not the only robotic rookie joining the NYPD. The department is also testing the use of a Knightscope K5 robot. The human-sized, ovoid K5 is equipped with cameras, sensors, and speakers. It’s meant to patrol and surveil its surroundings, detering break-ins and vandalism. This is not the K5’s first time out in public. The wheeled bots have been deployed in test cases to spy on the streets in places like Silicon Valley in California, where they’ve mostly been met with mocking suspicion and drunken violence. People on the streets don’t take kindly to these Dalek-like narcs, and every now and then somebody kicks the crap out of one. After all, they do tend to be very kickable. Letting more of them roam the already jam-packed New York streets—or the city’s subway stations—will likely garner them plenty of dirty looks and occasional beatings.
Here’s what else happened this week.
Parks Recreation
The weather is finally clearing up enough for us to get out in nature—and simply in time, Google has announced an update to Maps that will help people navigate the sprawling national park system.
The update will better show the layout and features of all national parks in the US. It will offer more detailed directions on bike routes, on trails, and within campgrounds, and it will highlight whole trail routes instead of just showing a pin at the location of the trailhead, to give users a better idea of what a hike entails. Hopefully the features will work better than Google’s regular search engine, and you won’t have actually to append “+Reddit” to find anything useful in the results.
Google’s Maps updates are coming in April for US national forests, and the business says it will gradually include parks throughout the world in the next couple of months.
iOSwiftKey
It wouldn’t be a newspaper article on the web nowadays without a dash of device intelligence. Last week, Microsoft slipped its generative-AI-powered Bing Chat bot into SwiftKey, an app that lets you type words on your phone by utilizing swipes and gestures on the keyboard. The Bing-made it possible for update was just available for Android, now the function has actually been added to the iOS version also.
SwiftKey has actually had a stretched relationship with iOS recently. Microsoft removed the app from Apple’s App store in 2015, then rapidly reinstated it.
