our old friend Detect robot dog is joining the Big Apple’s police force. New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the New York Police Department will purchase several new semi-autonomous robotic canines in the next few weeks. The move comes almost exactly two years after the NYPD halted the first step of using robotic dogs carrying cameras for surveillance, following a major lawsuit. outcry from the public; people feel it is a excessively backward police power. Now, Adams, a former NYPD captain, is continuing to push the program.
NYPD Says It Will Buy Two of Boston Dynamic’s controversial Detect bots. While the robotic dogs are capable of autonomous driving, the NYPD says the units will not patrol the streets on their own. Instead, the robots will be deployed in specific situations that pose a high risk to humans, like the bomb disposal robots the department has used. Each Spot will cost around $75,000, with cameras and sensors attached to their bodies costing more.
Spot isn’t the only robot rookie to join the NYPD. The department is also testing the use of the Knightscope K5 robot. The egg-shaped, human-sized K5 is equipped with a camera, sensors, and speakers. It is meant to patrol and monitor the surroundings, preventing break-ins and vandalism. This is not the first time K5 has appeared in public. Wheeled bots have been deployed in test cases for street monitoring in places like California’s Silicon Valley, where they’ve mostly been met with suspicion of mockery and drunken violence. People on the street don’t be kind with these Dalek-style storytellers, and every once in a while kick the crap out of one. After all, they tend to very comfortable. Letting many of them roam the already packed New York streets — or the city’s subway stations — could result in stares and sometimes beatings.
Here’s what else happened this week.
Amusement park
The weather is finally clear enough for us to be in nature—and at that moment, Google has announced an update to Maps will help people navigate the vast national park system.
The update will better show the layout and features of all national parks in the United States. It will provide more detailed directions on bike routes, on trails, and in campgrounds, and it will mark the entire trail instead of just showing a pin at the top. trails, to give users a better idea of what a hike entails. Hopefully the features will work better than the regular Google search engine and you won’t have to append “+Reddit” to find anything useful in the results.
Google Maps updates will roll out in April for US national parks, and the company says it will gradually add parks around the world over the next few months.
iOSwiftKey
Today, it wouldn’t be an internet news story without a bit of machine intelligence. Last week, Microsoft brought its AI-powered Bing Chat bot to SwiftKey, an app that lets you type words on your phone using keyboard swipes and gestures. The Bing support update is only available for Android, but it’s now available added to iOS version also.
SwiftKey has recently had a strained relationship with iOS. Microsoft deleted the app from Apple’s App store last year, then quickly restore it.
