
Google Has Made a Mess of Robotics - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-12/google-has-made-a-mess-of-robotics
======
ethbro
Because it's mentioned in the article, credit where credit is due to Willow
Labs for their incredible work in pushing the open source side of the field
forward.

[http://www.ros.org/about-ros/](http://www.ros.org/about-ros/)

Because of the nature of economics (vendors are either selling parts or
complete systems), no one had incentive to work on a reusable OS / framework.
This meant every lab project and product would start from scratch and rewrite
the same stuff. From seeing this at a research lab ~2011, it absolutely
impeded progress.

Grad students shouldn't have had to repeatedly reimplement all the utility
bits just to test their ideas on a far more specific robotics problem.

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beambot
You mean Willow _Garage_...?

~~~
ethbro
I most certainly do! And shouldn't type before I've had Sunday coffee.
(Especially as I pulled up Willow _Garage_ 's wiki entry out of interest
before I typed that!)

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doomlaser
Softbank now owns Boston Dynamics, and their CEO gave a good TED talk on the
current state of their robotic development a few months back:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO4In7d6X-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO4In7d6X-c)

~~~
wodenokoto
Just to clear up an ambiguous sentence: It's the CEO of Boston Dynamics, Marc
Raibert, talking at TED, not the CEO of Softbank.

It's a good talk, and probably the first time I've seen Boston Dynamics robot
portrayed in a positive light. The videos they have released in the past, has
always given of this Terminator vibe.

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mousa
There is one tiny little mention of Waymo in there but that's clearly the main
push for Google in robotics now, and if that's where those robotics aquihires
went maybe that's what they wanted.

~~~
krisoft
I wonder if that's because self-driving cars are not how the general public
expects robots to look like. C-3PO, R2-D2, and those orange arms in factories
are what most people imagine when they think about robots.

~~~
lozenge
Or because it's a bigger market? How much do most Americans spend on
transportation compared to say, things that come out of assembly lines? And
how much value can robots add to each of those verticals?

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amelius
A robot that prepares my dinner is more valuable to me than a self driving
car.

Why? Well, when I leave work, I spend 45 minutes in the car, and another 45
minutes preparing dinner. With self driving cars, that will not change. But
with self cooking chefs, that would add 45 minutes of quality time to my day.

~~~
bradleyjg
_According to the most recent data from the Department of Transportation,
there are 11.3 million motor vehicle accidents a year in America, with 2.4
million people injured in said accidents. 2016 was the deadliest year in
almost 10 years, with about 40,000 traffic deaths—up about 2,000 over 2015.

The economic impact of car accidents is almost as staggering as the numbers of
injuries and lives lost. The total economic impact of car crashes is a
whopping $871 billion in the U.S._
([http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/13792/car-accidents-
cause...](http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/13792/car-accidents-caused-
americans-432-billion-in-damages-in-2016-alone))

The revenue of the entire restaurant industry is less than that total economic
impact ($799 billion [http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-
at-a-...](http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-at-a-Glance))

~~~
greeneggs
The correct source is:

The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes
[https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812013)

Note that these numbers are made up to a certain degree, much more so than the
restaurant industry numbers, and so they are not necessarily comparable. The
NHTSA puts the value of one life at $8.86 million (in 2010 dollars) [p. 114 of
the report]. For 40,000 deaths, that's already $354 billion. They then add
other costs, too, which are also hard or impossible to measure.

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sologoub
The article completely misses one key point - SV and the start-up cycle
involve acquisitions that then result in payouts for founders, who then go on
to fund additional companies, some of which exit and repeat the cycle.

Even if Google did exactly nothing with robotics (which seems unlikely), the
infusion of capital to the people with expertise is good for the field.

~~~
jaggederest
They mention that in the part about vesting periods and executives leaving.

As a result I would expect to see a flourishing of robotics research in the
near future, I'm just disappointed that they were stuck there for 4 years in
the interim.

It makes me wonder if companies that are attempting to acquire smaller
companies might not just be better off leaving them _in situ_ and acting in
more of an investment role than an ownership role. Buy 52% of the company for
$x/1.9 instead of the whole thing, and in doing so provide them with funds but
not interference.

~~~
sologoub
The own/invest, but leave independent strategy assumes that Google itself
hasn't benefited in some way from the work done.

Further, you are also asking a corporation to admit that it's not as good at
deploying capital as the smaller company. That's may be true but is a tough
position to take.

I'll take the capital infusion with 4 year delay versus no capital.

~~~
jaggederest
> Further, you are also asking a corporation to admit that it's not as good at
> deploying capital as the smaller company. That's may be true but is a tough
> position to take.

That's literally what they're saying by acquiring though. They're saying "We
could use this money internally to build a clone but your company is operating
at a discount to what we can do ourselves"

And yes, certainly, capital is good either way :)

~~~
setr
Well, its also that the target company already has a working and functional
foundation, and possibly product, and has already gone through the effort of
finding experts in the area, and have a bunch of employees trained to work on
the system.

The choice is something like $5M acquisition or $1M building it + 2 years

For a large corporation, it makes sense that money is cheaper than time

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danjoc
The article makes it sound like Google's bet failed because of ageism. Google
hires young kids. Like all kids, they are interested in fun. The moment
something is not fun anymore, kids lose interest. Acqhiring some smart old
farts in robotics, then teaming them up with a bunch of kids just slowed the
old ones down. Held back industry for 4 years.

Not a flattering narrative for Google's public image.

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icebraining
_The moment something is not fun anymore, kids lose interest._

That's the ageist statement. Google doesn't hire three year olds.

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sidlls
It's true, though, in my experience. But it's also ageist: I've seen plenty of
people who are old enough to be on the second half of their life engage in
this chasing the new shiny behavior. I refer to them as kids because they act
like it.

~~~
skj
So perhaps "kids" is not the right word to use? Maybe some term that doesn't
try to draw non existent lines based on age.

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speedplane
Big companies buying up small ones and messing up their vision.... what else
is new.

