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Google Has Made a Mess of Robotics
- mousa 9y agoThere 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 9y agoI 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 9y agoBut 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.
- randomdata 9y agoNest and Google Home are on the market. They meet the definition of robot, but fall into the same problem the parent mentions.
- lozenge 9y agoOr 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?
- amelius 9y agoA robot that prepares my dinner is more valuable to me than a self driving car. Why? Well, when I leave work, I spend 45 minutes in the car, and another 45 minutes preparing dinner. With self driving cars, that will not change. But with self cooking chefs, that would add 45 minutes of quality time to my day.
- anindha 9y agoThe self driving car brings you dinner at an affordable price. It makes more sense for the dinner cooking robot to be making thousands of meals a day than just two for you each day.
- Eridrus 9y agoYou can already buy prepared food, the same way you can already get a taxi. The difference is that a self driving taxi will be far cheaper than a taxi, partly because it can be shared. A robot that prepared food already exists, it's called a factory, but food is far more variable in terms of people's desires.
- petepete 9y agoWhat you really need is a car oven and dashboard hob in your self-driving car.
- bradleyjg 9y agoAccording to the most recent data from the Department of Transportation, there are 11.3 million motor vehicle accidents a year in America, with 2.4 million people injured in said accidents. 2016 was the deadliest year in almost 10 years, with about 40,000 traffic deaths—up about 2,000 over 2015. The economic impact of car accidents is almost as staggering as the numbers of injuries and lives lost. The total economic impact of car crashes is a whopping $871 billion in the U.S. (http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/13792/car-accidents-caused-americans-432-billion-in-damages-in-2016-alone http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/13792/car-accidents-cause...) The revenue of the entire restaurant industry is less than that total economic impact ($799 billion http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-at-a-Glance http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-at-a-...)
- hyperbovine 9y agoI don't understand this question, all moving vehicles are built on assembly lines.
- lozenge 9y agoMost of your transportation cost isn't buying the vehicle, it's fuel, parking and upkeep. Even in the cost of buying the vehicle, it is already highly automated, how much can more robots decrease the price of the car?
- petra 9y agoIn the transportation market, it may be possible to own the ordering and aggregation process , which in certain scenarios become something with a strong network effects, hence strong barriers to competition . Robotics in general may not have strong barriers.
- humanrebar 9y 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 9y agoSure 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 9y agoThe 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.
- doomlaser 9y agoIt'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-makes-so-much-money-it-never-had-to-worry-about-financial-discipline https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-ma...
- Tenoke 9y agoThis sounds ridiculously simplistic though.
- Idontknowmyuser 9y agowhat 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.
- skj 9y agoHow 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 9y agoMaybe they finally found they cannot really push robotics to mass markets just yet, so they give up.
- icebraining 9y agoThe moment something is not fun anymore, kids lose interest. That's the ageist statement. Google doesn't hire three year olds.
- doomlaser 9y agoSoftbank 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO4In7d6X-c
- wodenokoto 9y agoJust 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.
- sologoub 9y agoThe 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.
- jaggederest 9y agoThey 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.
- sologoub 9y agoThe 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.
- jaggederest 9y ago> 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. That's literally what they're saying by acquiring though. They're saying "We could use this money internally to build a clone but your company is operating at a discount to what we can do ourselves" And yes, certainly, capital is good either way :)
- 9y ago
- speedplane 9y agoBig companies buying up small ones and messing up their vision.... what else is new.
- ethbro 9y agoBecause 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/ 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.