Alphabet held back robotics by purchasing a military industrial complex corp that produced excellent terminators and then couldn't handle the backlash from the

Alphabet held back robotics by purchasing a military industrial complex corp that produced excellent terminators and then couldn't handle the backlash from the public when videos started coming out of scary bipedal robots that could bring about the apocalypse. They proceeded to tell their engineers to "cut it out" and started creating parameters like, "no more bipedal robots" and "stop scaring the public." And, actually, their engineers ignored them and kept doing it, which annoyed Alphabet further so they put additional pressure to stop work in that direction. Though, the irony is that this led to a pretty awesome terminator bot that uses wheels, moves ridiculously fast, can jump and balance better than their bipedal robots and therefore become your friend faster. I don't personally feel they've held back robotics as an actual field, because the progress continued internally in spite of Alphabet's mismanagement and fear. However, Alphabet suppressed those robots from becoming mainstream products because they weren't the products they wanted and they were very sensitive about the impact on their public image. That division fully had the capability to release robots that could help people or industries in various ways; military (pack bots, soldiers), police (peacekeepers), steal your job bots, medical (bots that help lift people out of bed, or keep old people from wandering out of their prisons), pets (pet dogs, cheetahs that can hunt down your ex with speed and accuracy, a spider that can climb in bed with you and inject you with life saving chemicals that extends your life before giving you a hug goodnight), companions (definitely think sexual here, perhaps even combined with some of those pet ideas), and so on. It might have begat the dystopian future that keeps many of us, or just Elon Musk, awake at night. And, if that's the case be thankful Alphabet couldn't manage to get much into production. The only real way they've held back robotics is by never releasing anything, beyond previous commitments of course.