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I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics, and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up. The technology certainly looks amazing. Ar

I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics, and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up. The technology certainly looks amazing. Are the commercialization prospects really that bad?

ajross 9y ago
The video is amazing, but let's be honest: fluid motion without falling is something you can expect from a minimum wage employee. And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain. This is a different world from, say, machine learning. It's equally true that we're just now reaching the point where ML is as good as we are at recognizing photos of our children or transcribing our voice mail. But those ML algorithms can be deployed at cloud scale for pennies, so it's worthwhile where physical things aren't yet.
- FriedPickles 9y ago
  There's one proven application of this technology: entertainment.
- krapp 9y ago
  > fluid motion without falling is something you can expect from a minimum wage employee. And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain Fluid motion without falling, along with a lot of physical activities, turn out to be very hard problems both for robotics and AI[0]. So yes, while the applications may not be as potentially far reaching as with machine learning, as a technological achievement getting a bipedal robot to do a backflip is more impressive. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
  - ajross 9y ago
    Trust me, I know. I was answering the question of why a solution to a very hard problem in one space sees pervasive application, and a similarly impressive solution in robotics gets no interest beyond backfliping robots on youtube.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain Is that true? And if it is, will it remain true for long? To staff a position with humans 24x7x365 would cost over $100K/year ($7.25x24x365 = $65K, add in overhead and you get to $100K+ easily). If you can buy a robot to do the job for $100K, plus $1K/month for a maintenance contract), then you break even after the first 13 - 14 months. Add a year if the robot costs $200K. I don't know what these robots will cost, an industrial robot arm is in the $50-$200K range (or higher).
  - carterehsmith 9y ago
    Yeah, I guess that they are still looking for the killer app. For a while, it looked like they could be deployed as military mules; but they were too loud (due to the internal combustion engine) for that purpose. So, what can they do? Meantime, for $7.25/hour, you can hire a human that (hopefully) understands spoken words, and can do jobs requiring fine hand motor skills, e.g. pick-and-pack in warehouse, or serve meals and drinks, stock shelves, flip burgers etc. Boston Dynamics robot cannot do any of that. It can walk over difficult terrain, and flip, but who needs that? Perhaps they should focus on the "hands/arms" parts (as opposed to legs). Industrial robots don't use legs, they are fine with wheels and rails. Also legs are not really what stands apart - cheetahs and horses and mice can use their legs better than humans, but so what. What matters is hands - opposable thumbs, and so on.
    - kayoone 9y ago
      > Boston Dynamics robot cannot do any of that Yet. It's clear that they are not aiming for a commercial product anytime soon, this is ongoing research and the progress over the last decade has been huge and will only accelerate.
- empath75 9y ago
  Seems like the first use will be working on dangerous environments.
  - carterehsmith 9y ago
    There are already robots being used for mine sweeping, bomb disposal, nuclear reactor inspection, even mars rovers. They all make do with just wheels, or sometimes rails. It is not clear if adding legs to the above robots would make them any better.
    - brohee 9y ago
      Legs can access an order of magnitude more terrain than wheels. Think looking for survivors in rubble after an earthquake.
      - carterehsmith 9y ago
        I think a simple drone can make this use case much easier.
- melling 9y ago
  Who said their market was to replace minimum wage workers? You made that up then tried to convince us that it’s a bad idea.
  - simplyluke 9y ago
    Bingo. Their market is the DoD and anyone said department will let them sell to. The fair comparison isn't $10/hour workers, it's the entire cost of training, equipping, and employing a soldier (even in non-combat roles) and/or current military tech such as drones.
  - ajross 9y ago
    I did no such thing. I said their market was not billion-plus consumer applications as the case with much ML research, and that this might explain some of the lack of commercial interest mentioned upthread. I won't take a position as to whether this robot is a "bad idea". But pretty much anyone can see that (relative to the problem difficulty) it's a "worse idea" than, say, photo recognition.
warent 9y ago
I think Boston Dynamics is more of a huge practical research project that won't have commercialization results for at least 10 years (random number I generated on intuition), whereas companies like Google are committed to justifying their efforts on quarter-by-quarter basis. If a company owns Boston Dynamics and has one bad quarter, you have to trim the fat or deal with the bloodbath of angry impatient investors EDIT: That being said, companies like Boston Dynamics are, in my opinion, Star Trek tier, and, as a tangent, is a perfect example of why we need to eventually live in a world that doesn't thrive on currency profit
- opportune 9y ago
  Boston Dynamics' technology may be Star Trek tier, but its main use in the near future is going to be to kill, or help kill, rebels in Yemen That's why I think Google dropped them. Google doesn't want to be seen as Saudi Arabia's accomplice in a present or future conflict
  - foobarian 9y ago
    It doesn't need to be. Just sell the robots to both sides, and let the robots destroy each other.
    - opportune 9y ago
      Guess which side can afford robots and which one can't
      - forapurpose 9y ago
        Throughout history military power has been tied closely to wealth and population. Theorists of AI and robotic weapons talk about how that relationship could significantly weaken: You don't need a large population to build a robotic army, and while you need wealth, it may be that you just need better AI developers (who could be AIs themselves) more than you need more robots. Or maybe you just need to find the right combination of AI, hardware, and tactics first; win quickly and it's too late for the enemy to learn. Singapore with its high-tech foundation, for example, could become one of the most powerful nations in SE Asia, and maybe even beyond.
mstade 9y ago
I heard somewhere that the military wants to love these robots, particularly for hauling stuff into unfriendly terrain, but the main reason they simply aren’t viable is that they are much, much too loud. There were other problems too, complex maintenance in the field and the likes, but apparently that is less of a hassle than getting ambushed because the enemy heard you coming a mile away...
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  IIRC, a large part of that is down to the great dilemma of the modern age, power storage. The bots can't carry a battery big enough to give them realistic outdoor range, so outside of the test lab they require a small internal combustion engine, which of course is very noisy. With all the battery research being done for mobile devices and electric cars, I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a breakthrough there in the next couple of decades. Still, the servos alone may be too noisy for military use, I don't know.
  - nikanj 9y ago
    If you believe the news, there’s a breakthrough every other week!
  - Retric 9y ago
    Fuel cells seem like a good mix of quiet yet high energy density. Also, human style walking does not take much energy when done efficiently. But, wheels are even more efficient and equally effective in the vast majority of urban settings.
    - jcims 9y ago
      Did you watch their video of Handle? That's where it's at.
- jabretti 9y ago
  "Hauling stuff in rough terrain" seems like the PR-friendly version of what they want this technology for, but I don't think it takes too much imagination to think up other uses.
awalton 9y ago
> I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics It's a money pit, albeit a cool one. But that doesn't matter. Ruthless doesn't see the coolness, just the dollar signs. > and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up See "money pit." Defense manufacturers are all about how to extract money from the government, and this doesn't do that for at least 10 more years. Transportation is already a cut-throat industry built around fees and doublespeak, so... no joy there either. Boston Dynamics needs a R&D friendly rich company to leech off while doing their work, which could cost upward of a billion dollars over the next five years. Softbank, from what I can tell, is pretty much exactly that - they're willing to invest in Uber for goodness sake...
Geojim 9y ago
Don't be evil? Kind of hard to build robots to help kill people and spruik this motto at the same time. I don't buy the money pit argument, rarely been Google's sole yardstick. Kicker is in the US, government funded research is primarily through defense spending. If you're going to turn your nose up at that, you're on a long expensive path to monetisation in this space.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > Kicker is in the US, government funded research is primarily through defense spending Agreed. There are serious consequences to shifting government spending to mostly defense and reducing everything else. Also, it creates a large group with vested interests in continued and increasing defense spending, which includes favoring use of the military over other tools of state power.
0xbear 9y ago
Google is an advertising company. I wonder why they bought BD in the first place.

ajross 9y ago

The video is amazing, but let's be honest: fluid motion without falling is something you can expect from a minimum wage employee. And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain. This is a different world from, say, machine learning. It's equally true that we're just now reaching the point where ML is as good as we are at recognizing photos of our children or transcribing our voice mail. But those ML algorithms can be deployed at cloud scale for pennies, so it's worthwhile where physical things aren't yet.

FriedPickles 9y ago
There's one proven application of this technology: entertainment.
krapp 9y ago
> fluid motion without falling is something you can expect from a minimum wage employee. And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain Fluid motion without falling, along with a lot of physical activities, turn out to be very hard problems both for robotics and AI[0]. So yes, while the applications may not be as potentially far reaching as with machine learning, as a technological achievement getting a bipedal robot to do a backflip is more impressive. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- ajross 9y ago
  Trust me, I know. I was answering the question of why a solution to a very hard problem in one space sees pervasive application, and a similarly impressive solution in robotics gets no interest beyond backfliping robots on youtube.
Johnny555 9y ago
And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain Is that true? And if it is, will it remain true for long? To staff a position with humans 24x7x365 would cost over $100K/year ($7.25x24x365 = $65K, add in overhead and you get to $100K+ easily). If you can buy a robot to do the job for $100K, plus $1K/month for a maintenance contract), then you break even after the first 13 - 14 months. Add a year if the robot costs $200K. I don't know what these robots will cost, an industrial robot arm is in the $50-$200K range (or higher).
- carterehsmith 9y ago
  Yeah, I guess that they are still looking for the killer app. For a while, it looked like they could be deployed as military mules; but they were too loud (due to the internal combustion engine) for that purpose. So, what can they do? Meantime, for $7.25/hour, you can hire a human that (hopefully) understands spoken words, and can do jobs requiring fine hand motor skills, e.g. pick-and-pack in warehouse, or serve meals and drinks, stock shelves, flip burgers etc. Boston Dynamics robot cannot do any of that. It can walk over difficult terrain, and flip, but who needs that? Perhaps they should focus on the "hands/arms" parts (as opposed to legs). Industrial robots don't use legs, they are fine with wheels and rails. Also legs are not really what stands apart - cheetahs and horses and mice can use their legs better than humans, but so what. What matters is hands - opposable thumbs, and so on.
  - kayoone 9y ago
    > Boston Dynamics robot cannot do any of that Yet. It's clear that they are not aiming for a commercial product anytime soon, this is ongoing research and the progress over the last decade has been huge and will only accelerate.
empath75 9y ago
Seems like the first use will be working on dangerous environments.
- carterehsmith 9y ago
  There are already robots being used for mine sweeping, bomb disposal, nuclear reactor inspection, even mars rovers. They all make do with just wheels, or sometimes rails. It is not clear if adding legs to the above robots would make them any better.
  - brohee 9y ago
    Legs can access an order of magnitude more terrain than wheels. Think looking for survivors in rubble after an earthquake.
    - carterehsmith 9y ago
      I think a simple drone can make this use case much easier.
melling 9y ago
Who said their market was to replace minimum wage workers? You made that up then tried to convince us that it’s a bad idea.
- simplyluke 9y ago
  Bingo. Their market is the DoD and anyone said department will let them sell to. The fair comparison isn't $10/hour workers, it's the entire cost of training, equipping, and employing a soldier (even in non-combat roles) and/or current military tech such as drones.
- ajross 9y ago
  I did no such thing. I said their market was not billion-plus consumer applications as the case with much ML research, and that this might explain some of the lack of commercial interest mentioned upthread. I won't take a position as to whether this robot is a "bad idea". But pretty much anyone can see that (relative to the problem difficulty) it's a "worse idea" than, say, photo recognition.

warent 9y ago

I think Boston Dynamics is more of a huge practical research project that won't have commercialization results for at least 10 years (random number I generated on intuition), whereas companies like Google are committed to justifying their efforts on quarter-by-quarter basis. If a company owns Boston Dynamics and has one bad quarter, you have to trim the fat or deal with the bloodbath of angry impatient investors EDIT: That being said, companies like Boston Dynamics are, in my opinion, Star Trek tier, and, as a tangent, is a perfect example of why we need to eventually live in a world that doesn't thrive on currency profit

opportune 9y ago
Boston Dynamics' technology may be Star Trek tier, but its main use in the near future is going to be to kill, or help kill, rebels in Yemen That's why I think Google dropped them. Google doesn't want to be seen as Saudi Arabia's accomplice in a present or future conflict
- foobarian 9y ago
  It doesn't need to be. Just sell the robots to both sides, and let the robots destroy each other.
  - opportune 9y ago
    Guess which side can afford robots and which one can't
    - forapurpose 9y ago
      Throughout history military power has been tied closely to wealth and population. Theorists of AI and robotic weapons talk about how that relationship could significantly weaken: You don't need a large population to build a robotic army, and while you need wealth, it may be that you just need better AI developers (who could be AIs themselves) more than you need more robots. Or maybe you just need to find the right combination of AI, hardware, and tactics first; win quickly and it's too late for the enemy to learn. Singapore with its high-tech foundation, for example, could become one of the most powerful nations in SE Asia, and maybe even beyond.

mstade 9y ago

I heard somewhere that the military wants to love these robots, particularly for hauling stuff into unfriendly terrain, but the main reason they simply aren’t viable is that they are much, much too loud. There were other problems too, complex maintenance in the field and the likes, but apparently that is less of a hassle than getting ambushed because the enemy heard you coming a mile away...

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
IIRC, a large part of that is down to the great dilemma of the modern age, power storage. The bots can't carry a battery big enough to give them realistic outdoor range, so outside of the test lab they require a small internal combustion engine, which of course is very noisy. With all the battery research being done for mobile devices and electric cars, I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a breakthrough there in the next couple of decades. Still, the servos alone may be too noisy for military use, I don't know.
- nikanj 9y ago
  If you believe the news, there’s a breakthrough every other week!
- Retric 9y ago
  Fuel cells seem like a good mix of quiet yet high energy density. Also, human style walking does not take much energy when done efficiently. But, wheels are even more efficient and equally effective in the vast majority of urban settings.
  - jcims 9y ago
    Did you watch their video of Handle? That's where it's at.
jabretti 9y ago
"Hauling stuff in rough terrain" seems like the PR-friendly version of what they want this technology for, but I don't think it takes too much imagination to think up other uses.

awalton 9y ago

> I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics It's a money pit, albeit a cool one. But that doesn't matter. Ruthless doesn't see the coolness, just the dollar signs. > and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up See "money pit." Defense manufacturers are all about how to extract money from the government, and this doesn't do that for at least 10 more years. Transportation is already a cut-throat industry built around fees and doublespeak, so... no joy there either. Boston Dynamics needs a R&D friendly rich company to leech off while doing their work, which could cost upward of a billion dollars over the next five years. Softbank, from what I can tell, is pretty much exactly that - they're willing to invest in Uber for goodness sake...

Geojim 9y ago

Don't be evil? Kind of hard to build robots to help kill people and spruik this motto at the same time. I don't buy the money pit argument, rarely been Google's sole yardstick. Kicker is in the US, government funded research is primarily through defense spending. If you're going to turn your nose up at that, you're on a long expensive path to monetisation in this space.

forapurpose 9y ago
> Kicker is in the US, government funded research is primarily through defense spending Agreed. There are serious consequences to shifting government spending to mostly defense and reducing everything else. Also, it creates a large group with vested interests in continued and increasing defense spending, which includes favoring use of the military over other tools of state power.

0xbear 9y ago

Google is an advertising company. I wonder why they bought BD in the first place.