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Andy Rubin Is Heading a Secret Robotics Project At Google

Posted by Unknown on from the smells-like-the-animatrix dept.

sfcrazy writes "The creator of the most sought after 'Android' of the world has been secretly working on creating a robotics division within Google. The search engine giant has acquired over seven robotics companies recently to create the robotics unit which is being headed by none other than Andy Rubin himself. Andy made the disclosure in an interview given to the New York Times." Their initial goal is to automate the woefully manual process of electronics manufacturing.

27 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Going to change everything by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not long. And I don't think people will be ready to cope with the change.
    They haven't thought about what a tool which completely replaces a human and which costs less than a human salary means.

    At least a generation of severe disruption and even after that very likely structural unemployment over 25%. You will need to change society in some fundamental ways. Basic income is one possibility.

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    1. Re:Going to change everything by oodaloop · · Score: 2

      Civil unrest begins after unemployment % reaches a threshold. I don't know what the threshold is,

      So civil unrest may happen at some point. That's about as useful as saying there will be civil unrest unless there won't. Thanks a lot.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    2. Re:Going to change everything by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Funny

      They haven't thought about what a tool which completely replaces a human and which costs less than a human salary means.

      That tool already exists. It's called "junior IT consultant".

      Of course it's still unable to socialize with humans, but we're working on it.

    3. Re:Going to change everything by BreakBad · · Score: 2, Funny

      And this..

      Jack Handey : "I wish a robot would get elected President. That way, when he came to town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad."

    4. Re:Going to change everything by ebno-10db · · Score: 2

      It's not long. And I don't think people will be ready to cope with the change.
      They haven't thought about what a tool which completely replaces a human and which costs less than a human salary means.

      Didn't we have the same problem when those newfangled automated spinning and weaving machines replaced handwork? Or is the singularity just around the corner? I guess it must be, since it's always been just around the corner.

      Ok, maybe I'm being overly sarcastic, but this does seem like a "sky is falling" issue. I don't think we know what will happen. Predictions are hard to make - especially about the future.

    5. Re:Going to change everything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      in the late 1800's over 90% of the working population was employed in farming. today it's less than 5%. what happened to all these people? why don't we have 90% unemployment? first manufacturing took up the slack. now its office and leisure jobs

      1800's there was no entertainment or leisure industry except for traveling musicians. today we have a huge entertainment industry along with a vacation and leisure industry. money doesn't vanish, it gets invested in new businesses

    6. Re:Going to change everything by xtal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's called a guaranteed minimum income.

      The writing is on the wall, and creative endeavors that humans enjoy will dominate more of society. Isn't that what we all want? To do what we want?

      The concept is from the right, it's been around for a long time, and it's a fairly straightforward implementation. If a society is rich enough that the production costs approach zero, then ..

      Of course, it smells a lot like the dreaded socialism monster. Or worse.. red pink communism!

      There's no rocket science here. It will happen eventually, as the poor people get to vote. Either with ballots, or otherwise.

      --
      ..don't panic
    7. Re:Going to change everything by Catbeller · · Score: 4, Interesting

      More prisons, more Randism, more upper class loathing of the "lazy", less food assistance, less of any financial assistance, removal of affordable housing, drastic anti-loitering laws, and finally really nasty anti-rioting weapons and roundup tactics against agitators.

      I'm not describing the dystopic future - I'm describing the reaction right now. And the anti-poor crackdown will only intensify. The riots will be christened "terrorism" and all those lovely laws we've created since 2001 will finally find their real use.

    8. Re:Going to change everything by i+kan+reed · · Score: 2

      I like to think positively about it, like you do but recent trends seem to show voting rights as fickle and easily removed, while more violent solutions face the reality of militarized drones.

      If one characterizes the "war on terror" as an intercontinental class struggle(and I'm not saying that's the most informative characterization, just a useful one), another, far less pleasant, possible future appears.

    9. Re:Going to change everything by Catbeller · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The sky did fall. The protestors of the 1800's were correct. The people displaced by technology in the 1800s fell into poverty and early death, and England, for instance, was home to immense poverty and despair. We don't want to remember, which is not the same thing as not-happened. We choose to remember the happy industrialist and middle-class lifestyles which came from impoverishing the workers, not the majority of miserable people they created by re-distributing the wealth from the majority of the working people to their own class.

      thing to remember is that the people who were protesting their replacement by machines weren't really asking for history to be rolled back - they wanted to be *cut in on the profits* created by removing them from the books. They wanted some income redistribution. They lost. Since they didn't run university history courses, as industrialists did, they have been expunged from our collective memory and rendered into silly people who didn't want to stop making horse collars by hand.

      The price of all this will be misery, violence, hunger and early death for hundreds of millions of people, eventually, if history repeats. Looks like "yes". And no one will want to take notice, other than intense coverage of the violence in the "bad" neighborhoods.

    10. Re:Going to change everything by i+kan+reed · · Score: 2

      Those laws already found their use. What's more problematic is all the weapons and tactics that have been devised as a means of prosecuting a guerrilla war from the evil empire side.

    11. Re:Going to change everything by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Seriously, what is our long term goal as humans?

      Oh, I don't know -- maybe not having to spend half our waking hours, for over half our lives, doing something that we'd rather not be doing, except that we'll be homeless and starving otherwise?

      Sure, there are some of us lucky enough to get paid for doing what we'd choose to do anyway. There are even a lot of us who would make terribly unwise choices about what to do with our time if we didn't have to work for a living. But if we have a grand refactoring that separates "earning a living" from "having a career", I'm not sure it's necessarily a catastrophe.

    12. Re:Going to change everything by alexander_686 · · Score: 2

      I personally believe in the free market and capitalism and that it can solve this problem. If manufacturing costs drop to something close to zero, then the cost of making robots drop to something close to zero, so everybody will own a robot.

      I am saying this a bit tongue in cheek. There will be bottle necks and not everybody will be in the top 1% - it just I don’t expect the bottle necks to be who owns the robots.

    13. Re:Going to change everything by Saethan · · Score: 5, Informative

      not everybody will be in the top 1%

      In fact, I'd be willing to say about 1% of people will be in the top 1%

    14. Re:Going to change everything by scamper_22 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While I agree, I think you overstate what they wanted.

      People aren't that complicated. They aren't really interested in getting a cut of the profits. They aren't particularly interested in income distribution.

      What people want is to be OK. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. And people who used to be OK and then were suddenly not OK being displaced by a machine... are going to protest.

      And there's nothing wrong with that. I find the language we have to use today absolutely silly. As if you need to have a moral reason to just want to be OK. We feel the need to demonize profits and say its only fair workers get a cut of the profits. And what about the person who ever had a good job to begin with? And they suddenly not deserving of the cut of profits?

      Let's be honest about it. People want to be OK.
      And when you have something disruptive, the society had better make sure there are ways to be OK.

      Maybe it's income redistribution.
      Maybe it's government creating jobs for people.
      Maybe it's getting out of government so the cost of living goes down.
      Maybe it's organizing work sharing programs so more the actual work is spread out.
      Maybe it's training people for new work. ...

      Whatever it is... but people just want to be OK... and that's a good enough moral reason to do something. You don't need anything else beyond that. You are a person and you want to live a comfortable life.

    15. Re:Going to change everything by WhatHump · · Score: 2

      Combine this with the impact of climate change on the global food supply, and I fear we are heading into a very dark period. I fear for the world my children will have to live in.

      --
      "Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
    16. Re:Going to change everything by miroku000 · · Score: 3

      The sky did fall. The protestors of the 1800's were correct. The people displaced by technology in the 1800s fell into poverty and early death, and England, for instance, was home to immense poverty and despair.

      Do you have any sources for that claim? From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment "The Luddite events of 1811 were the beginning of humankind's analysis of whether it is possible for technological unemployment to be other than temporary and confined to particular industries and firms. Contrary to the Luddites' fears, technological advancement did not ruin Britain's economy or systemically lower standards of living throughout the following decades of the 19th century. In fact, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the opposite happened, as technology helped Britain to become much less impoverished than before. For this reason, some economists think that the general Luddite premise is fundamentally flawed, and thus they apply the term Luddite fallacy to it."

  2. Secret? by scuzzlebutt · · Score: 4, Funny

    I guess it's not so secret anymore...

    --
    In C++, your friends can see your privates.
  3. So, capitalism will fail and most people seem to.. by waspleg · · Score: 4, Informative

    have an allergy to anything that resembles socialism even if that's what they really want and don't know it (speaking as an American here). I just read an article somewhere yesterday that both Applebees and Chili's restaurant chains are replacing all of their waiters with a tablet based systems.

    When there is no work for anyone left and we're all under total 24/7/365 surveillance then what? I can't have Amazon delivering packages to my non-existent residence since robots took our jobs ;) (I'm in IT but it's not like we're immune; no one is).

  4. Re:So, capitalism will fail and most people seem t by waspleg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    (arguably it was never really successful. I'll reference Bill Hicks for that)

            "Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking
            down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over
            a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead...
            does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system
            doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"

  5. "Woefully manual"??? by Catbeller · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Woefully for whom? The last few manufacturing jobs in the industry and the people who work them are woeful?

    Where the hell is anyone going to get a job other than cleaning rich people's toilets? Hell, there's probably a robot for that.

    Shantytowns are illegal most everywhere, so people can't even squat in the mud and eat trash in peace when they lose their livelihoods. Should we just suggest 90% of the planet's human population just get it over with and off itself?

    1. Re:"Woefully manual"??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Where the hell is anyone going to get a job other than cleaning rich people's toilets? Hell, there's probably a robot for that.

      I hope so. Can we finally get rid of the "people aren't real people unless they work themselves to death" mentality and just accept the fact that you don't need 7 billion people to allow 7 billion people to live comfortably?

  6. Google sure does like to dabble. by ebno-10db · · Score: 2

    Self-driving cars, now robotics more generally? Maybe this sort of exploration is the right thing to do when you've got so much cash. It sure as hell beats those companies that have stopped investing in R&D, but considering how disparate this stuff is from search engines and whatnot, it does strike me as being a bit of a dilettante.

  7. Misleading summary by imunfair · · Score: 2

    I feel like the editorial comment in the summary is woefully inaccurate. I remember reading an article (probably on Slashdot) a year or two ago about the Apple outsourcing - and someone in electronics manufacturing in the US was talking about how they could do it with robots for the same price as China. The speculation was that they decided to go with China instead because they can make design changes (tell workers to do things differently) in a matter of hours - robot assembly lines aren't quite as flexible.

    You also have high level automation in places like the Amazon warehouses, so unless they're just talking about driving down costs I suspect it's far more innovative. Robotic delivery systems to go along with self-driving cars delivering your packages, stuff like that. "manufacturing and logistics markets" has a very broad meaning.

  8. Electronics Manufacturing is already automated by braindrainbahrain · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Exactly what part of electronics manufacturing needs to be automated? The cheap prices and mass production of electronics we currently enjoy is partly due to widespread use of pick-and-place machines and wave soldering machines. I'm sure there are some manual steps in the assembly, but that is only the last 10 - 20% of the labor involved in manufacturing. The bulk of it has been automated for decades.

  9. Re:Huh? by UnderCoverPenguin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The company I work for has a 5000 sq meter manufacturing facility packed full of robots - and only 5 engineers and 10 technicians. The manufacturing, assembly, packing and shipping are all automated. Even the maintenance is mostly automated.

    --
    Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
  10. Re:So, capitalism will fail and most people seem t by Garridan · · Score: 2

    With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain.

    Okay, you seem fairly aware of the issues surrounding mental health and poverty... but you're missing a fairly crucial piece of the puzzle. A large number of people are working at the limit of their abilities. I have a friend who works in a 'special education' program. She stays in contact with most of her students throughout their lives. Many of her students never advance beyond a 5 year-old mental capacity.

    Many of our janitors, kitchen staff, assembly line workers, etc. are doing as much as they possibly can. They can all be replaced by robots. They will all be replaced by robots, all in the name of the allmighty buck. These are people who are living happy, productive lives. Take those jobs away from them, and they will become unhappy, agitated... and according to you, the right level of socialism for them is to be institutionalized. That's not 'social'. That's monstrous.