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Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot
- Jun8 13y agoThis paragraph is the meat of the article: "That doesn’t mean the two innovation houses want to work together, however. Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, "What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?" DARPA doesn’t want to give Google money because it wants to use its $2.7 billion budget to fund startups with scarce resources, not Goliath tech companies, and its investments are supposed to seed technology that can one day be purchased by the Pentagon for national defense, which Google is unlikely to play along with." Note that there's nothing definitive, these are personal opinions of the author. Both of these opinions may be wrong: Google may not want to turn away from very lucrative government funding and application areas, it just doesn't want to do it publicly, this article is probably a PR piece smoothing the public's fears. On the other hand, DARPA's big funding targets have always been selected with the goal of "make the peaks higher" so it also stands to gain enormously from Google's robotic conglomerate.