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Boston Dynamics CEO talks profitability and the company’s next robots
- unixhero 6y agoI actually wosh they would stop.
- eyeball 6y agoCops will be using these to crush protestors in 10 years.
- jakear 6y agoAnd the engineers involved will have had no idea such a thing would happen. After all, they only had the best of intentions, right? And if they didn’t do it someone else would have, right?
- imtringued 6y agoCops manage to permanently injure or kill people with rubber bullets. I'm not really sure I can agree that the malice is in the tool and its creator. No matter how benign the tool you create, someone's going to abuse it. Should fishing companies feel responsible because someone out there used fishing line to strangle people to death?
- jakear 6y agoYou don’t actually see no differences between making fishing line, making less-lethal bullets, and making next-gen weapon-hosting kill machines for the military.
- creato 6y agoWhy would they do that when they can just use a horse or a wheeled/tracked vehicle?
- est31 6y agoHorses need to be trained (usually they don't like trampling people) and have high maintenance cost. As for the wheeled vehicle, it can be prevented access with roadblocks. Also it can't enter houses. Something that can walk over piles of rubble would be clearly very useful.
- gimboland 6y agoBecause it's utterly terrifying?
- aeyes 6y agoBecause you need a human to control it. A robot however could just be sent on patrol and its AI would do the rest leaving no one to blame.
- bildung 6y agoBecause then suddenly it's a tragical accident caused by a software fault, with no human responsible - just as most data breaches are framed as "cyber attacks" instead of what they actually are: negligence.
- danielheath 6y agoAnd the first “is a robot a human” test case will be when a protestor kills a police bot and they charge them with murdering an officer.
- kyuudou 6y agoIIRC similar rules apply for some police K9 dog units, as in killing one is akin to killing a human one. I love dogs and all but... I think that's a negative precedent.
- tomp 6y agoSo? Better than using tanks! The solution to police/state violence is political, not (anti-)technological.
- guerrilla 6y ago> Better than using tanks! In what way is it better? The results seem identical and processes sufficiently similar to be isomorphic.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 6y agoDang unpopular opinion on a tech forum I guess but I'm with you, and if I show the Boston Dynamics stuff to anyone not a tech enthusiast I'm likely to get a "why are they building executioner robots" It's like Elon's global internet. There's definitely some lives to be improved with video chat deployed anywhere on earth, but I don't take that to be a benefit worth the cost of enabling worldwide real time surveillance and the deployment of remote control killer robots.
- TheMblabla 6y agoHow is starlink any more a surveillance tool than existing ISP's? It should be pointed out that their approach won't be able to 'surveil' most in high density population areas, which is most people..
- cobookman 6y agoBoston Dynamics was founded in 1992. That was almost 30 years ago. Just me, or is it crazy they haven't had 1 year of profitability in nearly 3 decades of operations.
- irjustin 6y agoAgreed when you think of them as a normal business. it's bonkers, but if you're looking at it as a R&D shop - closer to pharma or biotech, it's less crazy (still a little crazy tho). That's why it can really on be funded by guys like Alphabet who can take these R&D hits. The bet really looks something iRobot - Every household has a robot servant/maid that's made by Boston Dynamics. Some of the more recent videos make me want to believe it's within my lifetime. I love watching the documentaries (parodies) of how we get to Skynet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE
- smabie 6y agoAnd people claim the markets/VCs are too short-termist. If anything, the opposite is true.
- onion2k 6y agoI don't think it's wise to extrapolation the intentions of VCs from a single example, especially when there are tens of thousands of counter examples.
- ackbar03 6y agoI don't think their main funding is from vc? As mentioned above it's darpa contracts before internalized within Google so quite the opposite it seems
- rexreed 6y agoThe markets and VC are too short-termist for things like this. The failure of many VC-funded robotics companies is evidence of this. Rethink Robotics. Jibo. Anki. I can keep going. The VCs ran out of patience long before the product gained market traction. And Boston Dynamics is not an exception. Government funded primarily until 2013 when it was acquired by Google. Google then didn't have the stomach to continue to fund it, so they sold it to Softbank.[1] [1] https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/06/09/its-no-wonder-google-sold-boston-dynamics-to-softbank/ https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/06/09/its-no-wonder-googl...
- bamboozled 6y agoIs it just me or is the next robot already a drone? Why walk when you can fly?
- accurrent 6y agoDrones run out of battery and have huge spinning blades that can take out somebody's eye. They might on occasion also fall out of the sky.
- taneq 6y agoMaybe because you want a robot with more than 30 minutes' autonomy? Wheels (if practical) are best. Then legs (or wheel/leg hybrids). Then fixed wing (if you have somewhere you can take off and land). Multirotors are easy and fun but only practical for short missions.
- onion2k 6y agoWhy walk when you can fly? Gravity. Overcoming gravity takes a lot of energy, and if you're only moving a relatively short distance it's a huge waste getting a payload in to the air if there's an acceptable alternative. For long distances fixed wing drones will definitely be better though.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoIts not really an issue for the US but in Europe the population is aging. That leaves Africa or robots. Companies like Boston Dynamics will be very profitable indeed in the next decades.
- tokai 6y ago>not really an issue for the US You got a source for that? The communications from the us census bureau seems to disagree. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/cb18-41-population-projections.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/cb18-41-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- leereeves 6y agoIt's somewhat less of an issue for the US. The median age in the EU is 43, vs 38 in the US, and 30 worldwide. And the median age in Germany is nearly as high as in Japan, which is famous for its aging population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
- dragonelite 6y agoEurope had Kuka as robotics company but it got sold to the Chinese.
- reizorc 6y agoI really wish they'd make tree planting robots
- suby 6y agoI have to imagine that blanketing an area with seeds dropped from a flying drone would be far more effective than a ground based robot which planted trees. Obviously the success rate of a ground based robot would be far higher, but I think we'd be better off going for quantity over quality. If that assumption is true, then we already have the tech to do this.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI recall when HN was discussing dropping seeds from an AC-130 few years ago, someone pointed out that it would be much more cost-effective to just hire locals to do it by hand. The same will probably apply to drone-planters.
- toyg 6y agoNot even "locals" - depending on location, you could bus in (or even fly in) masses of low-paid low-skill workers from somewhere else, like it happens for other agri tasks.
- RandallBrown 6y agoThere are a few startups working on this. DroneSeed is the one I'm most familiar with.
- jbob2000 6y agoTrees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot.
- webmaven 6y ago> Trees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot. Do you mean a robot to guard the forest from loggers, or something else?
- chr1 6y agoWould be cool to have a mobility device based on their handle robot (the one with wheels). Basically a hybrid of bicycle and wheelchair that can go over stairs, and be safer in case of accidents on the road.
- webmaven 6y ago> Would be cool to have a mobility device based on their handle robot (the one with wheels). Basically a hybrid of bicycle and wheelchair that can go over stairs, and be safer in case of accidents on the road. Didn't Segway demonstrate something like that? Edit: Okay, it's only somewhat Atlas-like, for very low values of Atlas. Dean Kamen first demonstrated the iBOT wheelchair in 1999: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT
- chr1 6y agoThe robot would be more like exoskeleton with wheels.
- zepearl 6y agoEven if they seem to work quite well, I always disliked a lot the design of the robots of BD. They look very weird, and how they move isn't much better => I always have a hard time when trying to keep watching one of their videos :P
- bane 6y agoIMHO, what BD really needs is a specific target use case to build towards. Right now Spot/Handle/Atlas are being positioned as robotics platforms. They're leaving it entirely up to others to figure out the use-cases based on the platform. However, without a really salient use-case to demonstrate why a $75k quadruped is better than a similarly priced remote-controlled and tracked robot, it's hard to envision how these things will take-off. The use-cases that I've read offered "search and rescue, bomb disposal" remind me of how early personal computers kept advertising "recipes and electronic check balancing" before they found their potential. What if, and here's a stupid example, BD knuckled down and super optimized Spot for truck-to-door package delivery. What if the driver never had to get out of the truck, stop the engine, or secure the vehicle to go walk the 30 feet down my driveway to drop off the last package I ordered? What if Spot simply grabbed the package, jumped out of the truck, dropped it on my doorstep and the ran back to the truck and repeated for all the houses on my street? What if over a period of some number of years it could be shown that this increased efficiency for a truck to more than cover the cost of the $75k robot? Spot would have to be able to: - charge on the truck while in transit - autonomously identify packages it can deliver (reading barcodes) - have a GPS database of all front stoops then navigate safely to them with a package - find it's way back to and onto the truck - alert the driver when a package is too large/awkward for Spot to handle by itself, - know when the driver decided to deliver the package instead of Spot You lose some truck volume to Spot, some batteries and a charger. But as the truck fleet electrifies, it could just use the truck batteries for some of this. Let's say each truck upwards of 200 stops on a route [1], at 1 minute per stop. A Spot enabled truck could drop that down to 30 seconds per stop. At the upper end (200 stops per route) that saves more than 1 hour of delivery time. Assume we're not trying to increase the carrying capacity of the truck, but reduce the hours worked per driver. UPS drivers make around $32/hr [2]. With Monday - Saturday delivery, that's about $10k per year per driver saved. At current Spot prices, that's about 8 years of operational service to pay for a Spot. Assume at volume the price per Spot can drop down to $50k per robot. Then that's a 5 year return. Let's say that this system works for $35% of all UPS and Fedex routes (delivery to single homes and townhouses) and there's one truck per route. Fedex - ~30,000 total trucks = 10,500 Spot enabled trucks UPS - ~100,000 vehicles = 35,000 Spot enabled trucks Total of 45,500 Spots = market of $3.4billion for BD at $75k per Spot, $2.27b at $50k. BD could probably do somewhere in the middle if they just leased the fleet of Spots, and provided managed maintenance, upgrades, and other services. What if USPS could take part in this, they operate ~140,000 LLV (mail trucks)? Now let's say these fleet delivery operators get self driving delivery trucks. How much of all package delivery could be handled by an automated truck + spot system and how much does that save UPS/Fedex in salary? There's no point making the trucks self-driving if the last leg of delivery isn't solved since they then have to pay a premium for the trucks and still pay for the delivery human, so a Spot-like solution would have to happen first. 1 - https://www.quora.com/How-many-stops-does-the-average-FedEx-drive-make-for-residential-deliveries?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-many-stops-does-the-average-FedEx-... 2 - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ups-driver-salary-SRCH_KO0,10.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ups-driver-salary-SRCH_KO...
- deegles 6y agoSeriously, I wonder how the engineers there will feel when these are sold to the military or the police and weaponized. Maybe they say they won't now, but to say it will never happen is wishful thinking IMO.
- bitbckt 6y agoThis is already a thing: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/29/10682746/boston-dynamics-big-dog-ls3-marines-development-shelved https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/29/10682746/boston-dynamics... No doubt, it will continue.
- kyuudou 6y agoI'm guessing this [1] is derivative of BD's work, robot dogs policing social distancing in Singapore. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz7A8Umw5zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz7A8Umw5zY
- likesftereppl99 6y agoLikely as guilty as we will when our disposable gadget, data center power hungry environmental mess is left to the next generation. Hard to really get behind such customized moralizing when we’re not really putting ourselves aside as engineers doing grave damage but on a longer, vaguer timeline. Our linear progression towards yearly updates is hardly warranted anymore. Exponential breakthroughs are pushed to the side with our fetishizing stable revenue over R&D, low taxes, unicorns built on cut/paste-able software IP, and mathematical gamesmanship, and eyeball addiction over variety of ideas. Purposefully stimulated chemical addiction to agency of self indulgence and nihilism is generating economic activity, not novel invention. Take some solace that it’s not all your fault: We’re not allowed to assess the validity of many key economic assumptions, even with historical evidence like the pre-80s era of high taxes and strong unions. Just trust that non-gods picked correctly for all time decades ago, and iterate on their meaning! Really having a hard time with the glaring hypocrisy of all first worlders right now. Science! Oh but also yeah just leave economics alone, the physics there has to be read different. Take yourself a bit more seriously first and we’ll moralize about others later.