Google Has Made a Mess of Robotics

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-12/google-has-made-a-mess-of-robotics

by petethomas • 9 years ago

159 49 9 years ago

mousa• 9 years ago

There is one tiny little mention of Waymo in there but that's clearly the main push for Google in robotics now, and if that's where those robotics aquihires went maybe that's what they wanted.

krisoft• 9 years ago

I wonder if that's because self-driving cars are not how the general public expects robots to look like. C-3PO, R2-D2, and those orange arms in factories are what most people imagine when they think about robots.

achamayou• 9 years ago

But like the rest of the efforts listed, that's not on the market at the moment. It probably isn't that close either, since there is no official release date.

lozenge2• 9 years ago

Or because it's a bigger market? How much do most Americans spend on transportation compared to say, things that come out of assembly lines? And how much value can robots add to each of those verticals?

humanrebar• 9 years ago

I wonder if that's because self-driving cars are not how the general public expects robots to look like.

Transformers are cars that drive themselves.

r00fus• 9 years ago

Sure but would people when asked "is the car from Knight Rider a robot?" they'd probably answer yes though they think of it as a car first.

I think it's a case that will be reinforced with the first viable self driven car.

danjoc• 9 years ago

The article makes it sound like Google's bet failed because of ageism. Google hires young kids. Like all kids, they are interested in fun. The moment something is not fun anymore, kids lose interest. Acqhiring some smart old farts in robotics, then teaming them up with a bunch of kids just slowed the old ones down. Held back industry for 4 years.

Not a flattering narrative for Google's public image.

doomlaser2• 9 years ago

It's more likely related to the cooldown in Google's expensive moonshot efforts since hiring a new CFO, Ruth Porat. Bloomberg wrote a feature story about this last year: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-ma...

Tenoke• 9 years ago

This sounds ridiculously simplistic though.

Idontknowmyuser• 9 years ago

what you're saying is ageism.

I don't fucking understand what the fuck is going on? every group who complains about some of form "ism" ends up doing it.

skj2• 9 years ago

How about: Rubin left the company, no one picked up the robotics org in the way it needed, and now the vesting schedules are seeing people leave? I don't know why ageism is the most likely theory.

tanilama• 9 years ago

Maybe they finally found they cannot really push robotics to mass markets just yet, so they give up.

icebraining• 9 years ago

The moment something is not fun anymore, kids lose interest.

That's the ageist statement. Google doesn't hire three year olds.

sidlls• 9 years ago

It's true, though, in my experience. But it's also ageist: I've seen plenty of people who are old enough to be on the second half of their life engage in this chasing the new shiny behavior. I refer to them as kids because they act like it.

webreac• 9 years ago

Making young kids work with old farts may be very effective. Young people learn fast and old ones are chalenged to prove they are not outdated and can work with young kids. If both groups are open minded, the result can be great.

palisade• 9 years ago

Alphabet held back robotics by purchasing a military industrial complex corp that produced excellent terminators and then couldn't handle the backlash from the public when videos started coming out of scary bipedal robots that could bring about the apocalypse.

They proceeded to tell their engineers to "cut it out" and started creating parameters like, "no more bipedal robots" and "stop scaring the public." And, actually, their engineers ignored them and kept doing it, which annoyed Alphabet further so they put additional pressure to stop work in that direction. Though, the irony is that this led to a pretty awesome terminator bot that uses wheels, moves ridiculously fast, can jump and balance better than their bipedal robots and therefore become your friend faster.

I don't personally feel they've held back robotics as an actual field, because the progress continued internally in spite of Alphabet's mismanagement and fear. However, Alphabet suppressed those robots from becoming mainstream products because they weren't the products they wanted and they were very sensitive about the impact on their public image.

That division fully had the capability to release robots that could help people or industries in various ways; military (pack bots, soldiers), police (peacekeepers), steal your job bots, medical (bots that help lift people out of bed, or keep old people from wandering out of their prisons), pets (pet dogs, cheetahs that can hunt down your ex with speed and accuracy, a spider that can climb in bed with you and inject you with life saving chemicals that extends your life before giving you a hug goodnight), companions (definitely think sexual here, perhaps even combined with some of those pet ideas), and so on.

It might have begat the dystopian future that keeps many of us, or just Elon Musk, awake at night. And, if that's the case be thankful Alphabet couldn't manage to get much into production.

The only real way they've held back robotics is by never releasing anything, beyond previous commitments of course.

doomlaser2• 9 years ago

Softbank now owns Boston Dynamics, and their CEO gave a good TED talk on the current state of their robotic development a few months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO4In7d6X-c

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

Just to clear up an ambiguous sentence: It's the CEO of Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert, talking at TED, not the CEO of Softbank.

It's a good talk, and probably the first time I've seen Boston Dynamics robot portrayed in a positive light. The videos they have released in the past, has always given of this Terminator vibe.

sologoub2• 9 years ago

The article completely misses one key point - SV and the start-up cycle involve acquisitions that then result in payouts for founders, who then go on to fund additional companies, some of which exit and repeat the cycle.

Even if Google did exactly nothing with robotics (which seems unlikely), the infusion of capital to the people with expertise is good for the field.

jaggederest2• 9 years ago

They mention that in the part about vesting periods and executives leaving.

As a result I would expect to see a flourishing of robotics research in the near future, I'm just disappointed that they were stuck there for 4 years in the interim.

It makes me wonder if companies that are attempting to acquire smaller companies might not just be better off leaving them in situ and acting in more of an investment role than an ownership role. Buy 52% of the company for $x/1.9 instead of the whole thing, and in doing so provide them with funds but not interference.

sologoub2• 9 years ago

The own/invest, but leave independent strategy assumes that Google itself hasn't benefited in some way from the work done.

Further, you are also asking a corporation to admit that it's not as good at deploying capital as the smaller company. That's may be true but is a tough position to take.

I'll take the capital infusion with 4 year delay versus no capital.

chrisbennet• 9 years ago

Those founders were stuck at Google after their acquisition weren’t they? (The article implies that but I honestly don’t know.) The “talent” they brought with them to Google was held back from working for other robotics companies by the 4 year vesting requirement.

I can see where your idea has merit in the long term, google seems to have set back robotics by 4 years or so in the short term.

OliverJones• 9 years ago

Hmm. Stuck? Shackled with golden handcuffs, it seems. It's not like they were locked up at San Quentin.

There's a lot of money chasing some ideas. I wonder if tech would develop faster if there were a little less money involved?

mathattack• 9 years ago

Exactly. It isn't like what's in the heads of everyone has disappeared. Now they can start on their own with their own money.

speedplane• 9 years ago

Big companies buying up small ones and messing up their vision.... what else is new.

ethbro3• 9 years ago

Because it's mentioned in the article, credit where credit is due to Willow Labs for their incredible work in pushing the open source side of the field forward.

http://www.ros.org/about-ros/

Because of the nature of economics (vendors are either selling parts or complete systems), no one had incentive to work on a reusable OS / framework. This meant every lab project and product would start from scratch and rewrite the same stuff. From seeing this at a research lab ~2011, it absolutely impeded progress.

Grad students shouldn't have had to repeatedly reimplement all the utility bits just to test their ideas on a far more specific robotics problem.

Sureai• 9 years ago

finroc.org

beambot• 9 years ago

You mean Willow Garage...?

ethbro3• 9 years ago

I most certainly do! And shouldn't type before I've had Sunday coffee. (Especially as I pulled up Willow Garage's wiki entry out of interest before I typed that!)

Google Has Made a Mess of Robotics

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