Our old friend Spot the robot dog is joining the Big Apple police force. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced that the New York Police Department will be purchasing some new semi-autonomous robotic dogs in the coming weeks. The move comes two years after the NYPD stopped using a camera-carrying robot dog for surveillance, following a major public outcry. Citizens felt that excessive police power was dystopian. Now Adams, a former NYPD captain, is once again pushing the program forward.
NYPD says it will get two of Boston Dynamic’s controversial spot bots. While the robot dogs have autonomous capabilities, the NYPD says these units aren’t patrolling the streets by themselves just yet. Instead, RoboDogs will be deployed in areas where the risk to humans is high, like the bomb squad robots used by the department. Each spot costs about $75,000, plus the cameras and sensors attached to their bodies.
Robot startups aren’t the only ones joining the NYPD. The department is testing the use of the Knightscope K5 robot. The human-sized ovoid K5 has cameras, sensors and speakers. It is intended to scan and scan the environment, preventing break-ins and vandalism. This isn’t the first time the K5 has gone public. The tire bots have been used in test cases to spy on the streets of places like Silicon Valley in California, where they have been met with mostly mocking suspicion and drunken attacks. People on the street don’t take kindly to these Dalek-like narcs, and every now and then someone takes a trick out of one. After all, they tend to walk a lot. Allowing many of them to roam the already crowded New York streets or the city’s subway stations earns them plenty of dirty looks and the occasional beating.
Here’s what else happened this week.
Parks and entertainment
The weather is finally clearing enough for us to get out into nature—and just in time, Google has announced an update to its maps to help people navigate the sprawling national park system.
The update better displays the locations and features of all national parks in the US. It provides more detailed directions on bike paths, trails and campsites, and highlights entire trails rather than just displaying pins at the location of the trail to give users a better idea of what hiking entails. Hopefully the features will work better than Google’s standard search engine, and you won’t need to add “+Reddit” to find anything useful in the results.
Google Maps updates are coming to US national parks in April, and the company says it will gradually add parks around the world over the next few months.
iOSwiftKey
Without machine intelligence, it wouldn’t be a news story on the internet today. Last week, Microsoft introduced its AI-powered Bing Chat bot into Swift Key, an app that lets you type words using swipes and gestures on the keyboard. The Bing-enabled update was only available for Android, but now the feature has been added to the iOS version as well.
SwiftKey has had a rocky relationship with iOS lately. Microsoft removed the app from Apple’s App Store last year and quickly reinstated it.
