10 years ago, hundreds of millions played a new video game. It was secretly built to harvest their data.

In yet another example of our human experiences being harvested to feed Big Tech, it has come to light that data culled from Pokémon Go, the once-trendy phone-based game, was leveraged to push robotics to the next level — players unaware. Those goofy humans running around their trendy cities, chasing meaningless but well-branded digital phantoms, never had the least idea who they were serving or what they were actually doing in the protracted “just for fun” exercise.

In point of fact, Pokémon Go, which incentivized users to "catch 'em all" in the immersive new "augmented reality” world, did disclose in its terms and conditions that none of the collected data would be owned by the players. Niantic Spatial, the owner of the game and designer of the bait-like fantasy creatures, buried this item deep in the small print, of course. The company knew, and we know now, that the players, much like anyone impatiently clicking those little pop-up checkboxes, never cared and likely never even read the T&Cs.

It's the theme of the times: harvesting the human until the human can be replaced.

Niantic’s dataset is so valuable because its players ran and walked with their children and friends through the unmapped urban canyons of the world, so difficult for GPS to access. Coco Robotics had a problem getting robots to deliver pizzas without GPS. The result — the intended outcome — is called visual positioning system. Niantic calls it “the future,” and it’s what robots of the present and future will be using to orient and navigate the physical world.

Robots will use VPS for delivering pizzas. Soon, they’ll also use it to deliver kinetic payloads — missiles, as civilians call them — to the doors of living, conscious beings. It would be nice to believe that former Pokémon Go aficionados will find themselves morally torn about such things, and as the explosions refresh their dulled recollections one last time, maybe a few of them will.

For now, as the brute facts of user exploitation come to light, there doesn’t appear to be much, if any, player complaint.

But what of the more sinister underlying pattern — people actively replacing themselves? At what point will people care about that? The new workflow of ramping up our own digital substitutes just keeps repeating itself. Games are developed and used for ulterior purposes, including military ones, as gamers who played Battlefield 3’s detailed Kharg Island map ruefully observe. Amazon plans to let go 14,000 employees in the near future. Jack Dorsey just dropped his staff from 10,000 to 6,000 with an X post. If they’re not safe, who is?

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Pokémon Go players aren’t to be blamed any more than the rest of us who know the adage, “If the product is free, you’re the product,” but failed to find much else to do with our time over the past 20 years but stare at “our” screens, ever more intently, for ever greater stretches of unremembered time.

One wonders: How far in advance of the development and release of Pokémon Go did the creators understand its collected data would be the big payoff? How long have they waited for the robotics tech to need their human datasets to scale? Can we blame the creators trapped in the substitutionary circuit any more than the users?

Our avoidant response to the flywheel of our self-induced obsolescence is enabled by soothingly rational arguments. After all, look around: Isn’t our national infrastructure wasting away? Isn’t our population aging? Wouldn’t we rather all take an early retirement? On the strength of such ideas, Jeff Bezos has unveiled his latest stratagem for hyperscaled success. The archetypal nerd, whose outsized winnings from the on-demand, on-the-couch economy have fueled his transformation into an ‘80s-style action figure, is pivoting into an AI-driven conquest of industry and manufacturing.

He is gathering a reported $100 million to buy up whatever distressed, fire-sale material operations he can, rejigger the works with robots, let his Prometheus AI djinn do the management, and, along the way, jettison the human “element” entirely. Is this to usher in the age of no work and all play? Back to owning nothing and being happy we go, this time wrapped in a nationalist instead of globalist skin.

And what happens after AI conquers every building, every company, every neighborhood? There's no more value to be extracted from our world but us. It's the theme of the times: harvesting the human until the human can be replaced. With what, if anything, “expert” opinion differs.