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Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up For Sale In Robotics Retreat (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes from an article on Bloomberg: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn't likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, said, "we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there's some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years." In December, Google announced that Replicant had been folded into Google's advanced research group, Google X. In a private all-hands meeting around that time, Astro Teller, the head of Google X, told Replicant employees that if robotics aren't the practical solution to problems that Google was trying to solve, they would be reassigned to work on other things, according to a person who was at that meeting. Boston Dynamics, though, was never folded into Google X and was instead put up for sale.
The impression I had was that Big Dog was their big product. Google bought them and killed the program cause they don't do defense work. I thought the Army saying Big Dog didn't meet noise requirements was something that allowed everyone to save face.
Maybe Google shouldn't have bought a robotics company that was primarily defense funded...
Do you feel bad for shovels when people use them to dig? Your mind is pattern matching humanistic traits and applying them to a smarter shovel in a sense. I too feel bad. Thats just a neo cortex lingering issue.
If your timeline for generating revenue is "a few years", then you should not be in the business of doing advanced research. You're just going to be disappointed.
Not necessarily, applying physical violence to any productive object will always evoke a sense of waste at the very least. Using a shovel to dig isn't the same thing as abusing a shovel. If I saw someone kicking their shovel over, I'd think twice about approaching that person soon after for pleasant conversation. It is the action being judged, not the recipient of the action (which is only ever imaginary anyway)
Doesn't "running a bunch of data through a neural network" also define our own existence?
The article hints at other reasons. The latest youtube boston dynamics video showing the robot doing human work, was not only impressive, it was frightening. Not that we don't know that it is going to happen (not only in transportation, or manufacturing but also in service, consulting, transportation, delivery, military, health care or teaching), it was scary to see a bot doing things so well, to walk around, do errands. For a company, to be associated or identified with a job eliminator, this is a PR disaster in the long term. Its more subtle in AI or other domains of automation, where we don't see it. And then the article mentions also the lack of short term profitable products and leadership problems. But its interesting to see how non-technical factors start to matter more and more. But as mentioned before, the most important asset which google probably got from the company is the know-how, the top notch engineering, the human potential which can do be used also in non-robotic things. But whoever buys the company, the technology will continue change the future. Amazon is interested. Imagine all the packing and delivery work done by such droids. Maybe they should dress them as minions to make it more acceptable ...