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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.

7 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 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.

    2. 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
    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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%

  2. 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?"