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This is surprising to me. It seems that many prominent Googlers are very optimistic about robotics. For example, in the FAQ of Jeff Dean's recent talk in Seoul

• jonas21 11y ago
  Most of Google's robotics acquisitions were driven by Andy Rubin, who was trying to build a robotics division within Google. Once he left the company, it probably left their future uncertain.
  • wpietri 11y ago
    It's always a bad sign to me when a company's strategy lurches based on who's around rather than on changing external circumstances. It suggests to me that the strategy isn't a coherent, collectively understood plan, but a political balance.
    • ansible 11y ago
      It suggests to me that the strategy isn't a coherent, collectively understood plan, but a political balance. I suspect that's the way it is... everywhere, all the time. That's been my experience.
      • ethbro 11y ago
        I think it's a stronger phenomenon in cutting edge areas, as there's less group-think to fall back on or use as a crutch. Everyone knew what to do with a typewriter, even if the visionary leader left. If the person who was saying that microcomputers were going to be the next big thing quit? Nobody else has that idea in their heads.
        • wpietri 11y ago
          Is this from a real-world example? Because I'd expect the opposite to be true. Cutting-edge areas tend to attract people there for the vision. And the harsh commercial realities of innovative markets mean companies get in trouble if they get complacent. Whereas people in larger, older companies in stable markets can let their vision die and just go on doing whatever worked before. At least until it doesn't work, and then they're screwed.
          • ethbro 11y ago
            In this instance, Google is a larger, older company. Or to extend the analogy, if someone goes to IBM as director for New Technology X, and then leaves five years later, what's the likelihood people in New Technology X Division are going to be able take his or her responsibilities over? Big companies are big companies and they usually don't encourage or reward employees overly much for striking out in a brave new direction. Which is hilarious given that they'll continously try and hire exactly those people externally. Though I suppose you honestly can't encourage too much rebellion when you make your money from a crank being turned (and happen to need 1,000 bodies to just shut up, turn the crank, and get paid).
      • georgeecollins 11y ago
        It is often true, but not always true. I have worked at or worked with companies that could express their strategy. But usually they are not big multi-division companies like Alphabet.
      • wpietri 11y ago
        I think it's the common mode in American business culture the last few decades, but I think that's a result of the managerialist paradigm that has come to dominate. Most startups avoid it to begin with. There's a really strong incentive for having a clear mission and high customer focus; many things get easier. Wikipedia has done a good job with "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." Toyota has done a fantastic job organizing around the Toyota Production System. The best restaurants, bakeries, and the like generally have strong shared understandings. The same is often true of multi-generational family firms. I think even Google did a good job for a long time rallying around "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". Which makes this especially sad to me. Around the time of Google Plus and "more wood behind fewer arrows" I think there was a culture shift that is probably irreversible.
        • lovemenot 11y ago
          >> I think it's the common mode in American business culture the last few decades Agreed. I find it doesn't hold for most contemporary Japanese corporations though. Their leaders tend to be switchable placeholders whose main purpose is to efficiently represent a consensus view. Interestingly, though they do have momentum, they seem to lack strategic direction. Perhaps only charismatic leaders can provide the latter. Japan can produce such people (e.g. Morita at Sony) but the current environment values continuity over vision.
          • wpietri 11y ago
            Very interesting. I suspect that Toyota is a similar result of a visionary leader. I want to believe there's some way to get the benefits of both approaches at scale, but I have yet to see an example. Do you have anything you'd suggest I read to get a better understanding of the current Japanese situation? Most of my knowledge is about historic Toyota, which I'm sure gives me a distorted view.
            • lovemenot 11y ago
              >> Do you have anything you'd suggest I read Sorry, my opinion is formed only by observation and discussion with related parties. I don't have any direct experience of Toyota, except with one of their trading company's subsidiaries. Uniquely, this company does have a visionary leader at the helm, yet I believe there is no correlation with the parent's leadership style because Toyota Tsucho is run at arms length. My rather uninformed opinion of Toyota Motors is that they are succeeding exactly as other Japanese companies used to succeed. If this is right, and I hope not, then they may be fated to see the same stagnation in time. A more optimistic view is that Toyota have something unique. If so, I don't believe it to be charismatic leadership. It would be baked into their culture. Of note is Toyota's recent decision to invest $1B in AI research in Silicon Valley and Boston. They are trying to get ahead of the coming tech for autonomous driving and factory automation. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/technology/toyota-silicon-valley-artificial-intelligence-research-center.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/technology/toyota-silicon-...
    • sdenton4 11y ago
      Yeah, but we're talking about shaping the future here: If you're relying on external circumstances for your hints as to what to do next, you're just reacting to the present....
  • daok 11y ago
    That is very odd for me. How come a single man can change the faith of such a huge company in 2016.
    • rkalla 11y ago
      It makes more sense once you take on a senior level role in those big companies, you start to see how a single, charismatic and convincing person can mentally mobilize (over a period of time) a large group of people to align with their hopes and dreams. I was baffled by this as well, until I got closer to it and got to see "how the sausage is made". It is amazing what a confident, strong personality can do in a group of people in _any_ setting.
      • siscia 11y ago
        What is this "How the sausage is made" you are talking about ? Is a video you can share ?
        • ascorbic 11y ago
          It's a quote, with an uncertain source. "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made"
        • jon-wood 11y ago
          Not the OP, but its an English idiom rougly meaning everyone loves sausages until they see what goes into them, at which point they lose their charm.
        • bglazer 11y ago
          "How the sausage is made" is an American idiom. Generally, it means "a process that makes a good thing but is chaotic or messy". We say this because sausage is tasty, but most people prefer not to see all the animal parts being ground up and stuffed into an intestine.
          • cubano 11y ago
• arcanus 11y ago
  Uber bought out several prominent researchers from CMU a few months ago, but are there any famous members at the Tesla team?
  • CardenB 11y ago
    There's a researcher from Brown (I believe) leading the autopilot team now. But it's no where near as strong as a team at Uber ATC.
  • rst 11y ago
    Some of Tesla's autonomous vehicle work is in conjunction with an Israeli company called Mobileye which has autonomous highway driving demos of its own, though Elon has been quoted in the press as saying that's not all of it...
    • rasz_pl 11y ago
      Mobileye is a lane following relabelled as self driving.
• toyg 11y ago
  > It seems that many prominent Googlers are very optimistic about robotics. BD was heavily geared towards defence contracts. That stream is gone. They will now have to do some painful restructuring, I guess Google don't want the bad publicity. There are probably conversations going on that made the acquisition worth at the time (favour with public figures etc, Google has long been cozy with spooks and military types), and losing those contracts probably changed the equation significantly enough.
  • ginko 11y ago
    >I guess Google don't want the bad publicity. So now that their research won't be used for murderbots anymore they're worrying about bad publicity??
• nxzero 11y ago
  Google's clearly interested in robotics, DoD, etc.; my guess is that this exit is for cultural reasons. Honestly, surprised they just didn't shutdown the company if things aren't going well.
  • vonmoltke 11y ago
    Google is specifically not interested in DOD work. I don't understand why Google decided to buy a company so tied to DOD contracts if it did not want to continue that work.
    • culturestate 11y ago
      > I don't understand why Google decided to buy a company so tied to DOD contracts if it did not want to continue that work. My experience in this area is quite limited, but it's surprisingly difficult to find companies doing this type of research that are not tied to the DoD in some way. DARPA is a major source of funding for these projects, and many of them wouldn't get funded at all without the government.
      • dgacmu 11y ago
        Case in point, at least until now: iRobot, maker of everyone's favorite robotic vacuums ... and military support robots. (Now spun off, but a core part of the company's strategy for two decades.) Its first years were DARPA-funded for the military applications.
    • nxzero 11y ago
      Google is clearly interested in working with the DoD: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/03/02/eric-schmidt-google-pentagon-ash-carter-advisory-board/81194738/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/03/...
      • vonmoltke 11y ago
        Eric Schmidt participating in an advisory panel on technology trends is not evidence that Google/Alphabet wants to do business with the DOD.
• iandanforth 11y ago
  It's a big company so it should be no surprise that some sections of Google are very excited about robotics. For example you may have seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaF43Ze1oeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaF43Ze1oeI which is research done by Levine et al at Google. One thing to notice in the video though is that those are all custom arms. Someone was able to get $1M+ to build out that lab and the work is on going. I think the thing that Google has recognized is that cutting edge robotics research that takes advantage of the work they have already done in deep learning doesn't require the kind of robots that Boston Dynamics (or many of the other companies they bought) build. Cutting edge robotics (from the perspective of learning systems) is back at the level of getting a single arm and a camera to learn basic tasks. In fact, there is a lot of research that can be done in simulation with these new deep methods that doesn't even require hardware. The software and learning systems they can develop will very likely make their way into super advanced complex hardware like Atlas in the future, but for now it's probably not the best use of their time.
  • joe_the_user 11y ago
    Cutting edge robotics (from the perspective of learning systems) is back at the level of getting a single arm and a camera to learn basic tasks. Which is a nice way to say that robotics really hasn't progressed that much in a sense an outsider would see as progress (where progress on outsider-terms would be Boston-Dynamics style robots that can, say, learn task and repeat them), though I'm sure researchers can point to a lot of progress on their terms.
    • sbierwagen 11y ago
      Which is a nice way to say that robotics really hasn't progressed that much in a sense an outsider would see as progress I work in mobile robotics, and I can tell you that there hasn't been a lot of progress. I wrote a post four years ago about all the various huge showstopping technical challenges facing mobile robots: http://c1qfxugcgy0.tumblr.com/post/31187427192/the-enduring-tragedy-of-the-robotics-industry-is http://c1qfxugcgy0.tumblr.com/post/31187427192/the-enduring-... Basically nothing has changed since then. To have a useful anthropomorphic robot you need better: batteries actuators software computers Only in software and computers are we seeing fast progress. (Big improvements in ConvNet algorithms, and the fast video cards you need to run them) But actuators need to be more powerful and much lighter, and batteries need to store at least ten times as much power. Progress in these fields has been slow, since energy storage is a mature field, and you don't see routine doubling of performance like you do with CPUs. And, of course, an economically useful anthropomorphic robot has to be dirt cheap, as well.
• joe_the_user 11y ago
  It seems like there is significant distance between being able to move forward in a stable direction and be a generically useful and sellable product. There are a lot of problems to be solved before such a thing could work in even an Amazon warehouse along side humans in a cost-effective fashion - and the use of this thing is it's potential working-where-humans-work ability, otherwise it's easier to have automated bookshelves. And I'd choose an Amazon warehouse because it's an ultra-structured, streamlined environment, anything else would be harder.
• freethrow 11y ago
  It should be no surprise...
• hnmcs 11y ago
  Time for an update on things from Kurzweil? http://singularityhub.com/2013/03/19/exclusive-interview-ray-kurzweil-discusses-his-first-two-months-at-google/ http://singularityhub.com/2013/03/19/exclusive-interview-ray... http://www.kurzweilai.net/ http://www.kurzweilai.net/
  • Terr_ 11y ago
    Kurzweil gives updates? I thought he always took the same spiel and changed the timestamps whenever he felt he wasn't getting enough attention. P.S.: Although probably not as aggressively self-promoting as the occasional Wolfram Noun Wolfram Verb Wolfram Wolfram.
    • hnmcs 11y ago
      Well I did see a YouTube of him at a Google conference around 2014 or so, doing some power points and taking questions from people. Here, I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_nOddk01E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_nOddk01E ("biologically inspired models of intelligence", I/0 2014) That's not the robotics domain per se, but if you're the director of engineering at Alphabet/Google, you probably have opinions about robotics. I'll welcome any material news about him in our our thread, the more recent the better.
      • tonfa 11y ago
        s/the director/a director/
        • hnmcs 11y ago
          thank you
• s_q_b 11y ago
  Google mostly bought Boston Dynamics to annoy the Pentagon, right after the Snowden revelations broke. DARPA sees Boston Dynamics' research as key for future ground-drone combat. Guessing somebody made a deal to get them back.
  • progressive_dad 11y ago
    Like Eric Schmidt in his new position at the Pentagon?
  • mcguire 11y ago
    I find this implausible. I don't see Google spending that kind of money with out something sort-of resembling a plan[1], and didn't that purchase have to go through SEC approval? The DoD does have some pull with the SEC. [1] Project Azorian not withstanding. Plus, it was funded by the government.
    • s_q_b 11y ago
      Don't underestimate the pettiness of billionaires, and the lengths they will travel to embarrass one another. In fact, I can't think of a plausible reason for purchasing them and then putting them up for sale so quickly that doesn't involve political variables.
• hackaflocka 11y ago
  Suspect that Google is uncomfortable with the primary purpose of their products being to kill people and take their resources.
  • krapp 11y ago
    They weren't too uncomfortable to buy the company that makes those products for that purpose to begin with.