Judging by the other comments ("Finally! Something to retrieve a socket wrench from all the way across the room!"), my view that this robot is utterly useless i

Judging by the other comments ("Finally! Something to retrieve a socket wrench from all the way across the room!"), my view that this robot is utterly useless is indeed an unpopular opinion. This is HN and people love the "oh look this is so tech" kind of story. The whole startup scene is about it. I'm not seeing a ton of other people who said the same thing prior to my comment, but to placate you I edited my comment to remove the "unpopular" part. I would ask that you reply to what I say, rather than the specific wording. If I may point it out, your comment critiqued my choice of words while totally ignoring the point I stated. The argument is: these things are useless in the real world. This argument is falsifiable: come up with a use case for this robot that is real-world reasonable given the price point and other practical considerations. If BD is charging $75k for a product that has been in development im one form or another for 10+ years, it seems reasonable that the burden is on BD to prove it's a useful product. Judging by the history of the product, it seems clear that it's a novelty item. The DoD turned its back on the very loud BigDog, and Google handed BD off to Softbank when they weren't able to answer the question, "so, how do we make money from selling this robot to consumers?" You can buy three Ford pickup trucks, brand spanking new, for the price of one of these robots. Boston Dynamics isn't exactly a company that makes products. They are a bunch of researchers who turn money into technology. That technology may involve impressive robotic motion, but not every impressive thing is useful to consumers. There's a very strong sense among many robotics weenies at MIT that, if you make cool stuff, the DoD or some major corporation will eventually reward you with money that allows you to make more cool stuff. That sense is embodied by Boston Dynamics, in my mind. It doesn't translate to a useful product, whether intended for the consumer, commercial applications, or heavy industry. And the dangerous bit is that this engineering philosophy of "find someone who will pay us to keep making cool useless stuff" only serves to create tools for the over-funded, which in our society means militaries, police, and other anti-human actors. So the most likely use of this product, if there is any use at all, is a destructive and anti-people application. But I don't think it's very useful even for those purposes, because of price, fragility, need to recharge, light payload, etc. Be honest. Can you think of any specific application where this product is better than something else (including human labor) that can be bought for $75k?