
Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department - calcsam
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/uber-would-like-to-buy-your-robotics-department.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
======
ClintEhrlich
I found some of the almost mournful passages in this piece off-putting. As the
author ultimately recognizes, the drift of robotics talent from publicly
funded universities to private enterprises is an indication that the
technology has advanced to the point of commercial viability.

In other words: Companies finally think they can build robots that are good
enough that people will pay for them! To me, that is exciting news, not an
occasion to lament the sudden emptiness of university laboratories.

Perhaps in other fields, there is a strong tension between the basic research
that government funds and the commercial applications that private companies
pursue. But in robotics there are usually foreseeable uses for the
technologies that researchers are pursuing. I don't foresee the direction of
the field being dramatically changed, particularly given the amount of
government money that will still pour in through the DoD.

~~~
artnep
Uber and other companies (including Google) have been hiring a lot of robotics
faculty as well as newly-minted PhDs. This is a good thing for robotics
research.

There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of
qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career
options. This is one of the reasons why CS PhDs have a much higher chance of
getting good tenure-track faculty jobs than, say, physics PhDs.

Of course, when there's a faculty exodus it causes a temporary leadership
vacuum--e.g. this has been the situation at Stanford for the last couple
years, where most of the AI faculty has left to start companies. But most of
the students at Stanford seem to do fine, and universities can usually fill
the void in a few years and hire some new enthusiastic faculty.

~~~
nickff
Yes, the editorialist here seems to be bemoaning the 'professionalization' of
the research topic, as if the companies and researchers owe some sort of
loyalty to a university which profits off the cheap labour. It is roughly
equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best
players, and paying them more.

~~~
untog
That analogy breaks down a little - one of the reasons to lament this is
because public universities publish their research for others to consume and
build upon. Research within private companies stays inside those companies.

~~~
melling
No, that's wrong. The same amount of research can still be done in public
universities if the talent pool is increased. You now simply have a lot more
people working on the problem. Have a dozen companies with a staff of a few
hundred researchers creating more knowledge, even if it's temporarily private,
is a huge win. Patents expire and other companies are still capable of
figuring out the competition's solution.

Basically, the entire premise is stupid. We are adding a few thousand highly
skilled people into the workforce. There's no way that's a problem.

~~~
ambicapter
You can't honestly think that the department will continue doing the same
caliber of research immediately after losing 50 of its members. It will take
years to regain the amount of know-how that just vacated the premises.

~~~
melling
In the meantime that team just got a huge budget increase to continue their
research.

CMU is a great university. I image there are 2-3 PhD students at the top 50
school who will be looking to work there. CMU might even be able to lure away
a couple other professors from the top 25 who'd love the chance to rebuild the
program.

------
Animats
Uber didn't buy CMU's robotics department. They hired the employees. CMU
didn't get any money out of it.

It's good to see robotics finally happening. I used to be in that field; I had
one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams in 2005, and was a visiting scholar in
robotics at Stanford in the early 1990s, where I figured out how to get legged
robots run over rough terrain. It was all too early back then. Now I'm too
old.

Nobody is making any money yet, though. Other than teleoperators for the
military, vacuum cleaners, and industrial robots, there are no robot products
that sell in quantity. Industrial robots with some limited AI are now
available[1] but sales are small. This still isn't a commercial technology.

[1]
[http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/](http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/)

~~~
shostack
An important distinction for sure. I wonder if this will make academic jobs
more competitive with corporate jobs at those levels.

Side question, but where is the line drawn between something being considered
"robotics" vs. something else? For example...is a Nest a robot? If it controls
the temperature in my home by regulating various valves and such, isn't that
robotic, even if the device isn't physically moving from thermostat to
thermostat to change the temperature?

~~~
Animats
It matters that robotics isn't making money yet. Google has a big automatic
driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get
into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also,
making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock
would go down if they did that. Google could become a parts supplier to
Detroit, but that's not very profitable. All the big carmakers already have
their own automatic driving systems. Cadillac has one developed with CMU which
is almost as good as Google's. It's hard to see how Google turns automatic
driving into a big moneymaker.

Google isn't a patient company. They kill off products and research that don't
pay off within a few years. At some point, they may "put more wood behind
fewer arrows" and dump automatic driving. They've done it before. Google
hasn't historically spent big outside their core business area. Google Fiber
is still just a few demos, and that's been going on for years now.

Uber is in a better position. They're in the transportation business. They're
losing their labor lawsuits and will end up buying cars and hiring drivers. As
a high-volume car buyer, they can get car companies to put their self-driving
technology in the cars they buy. For Uber, automatic driving adds to the
business model.

~~~
shostack
While the question on profitability and margins still exists, I think there
are some fairly obvious monetization angles for Google with self-driving cars.

A couple off the top of my heads:

\- Freeing up all that additional time lets people use their devices to browse
the internet which leads to more ad revenue

\- Knowing that an AdWords ad engagement results in physically driving a
customer to my retail location helps prove the value of "clicks-to-bricks" in
a huge way that is worth a lot to big advertisers (speaking from experience).

\- Licensing the technology and having access to all of that data can be
leveraged for some very interesting targeting capabilities.

\- Defensively, it keeps them in a position of power over auto makers, Tesla,
Apple, etc.

Also, Google Ventures has a significant investment in Uber, so if Uber
succeeds, in some ways Google succeeds.

------
rubidium
"There’s a useful high-tech concept called the Technology Readiness Level that
helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came up with this scale to
gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. At Level 1, an area of
scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands its basic principles. At
Level 9, the related technology is so mature it’s ready to be used in
commercial products."

There's a often a big difference between the people who like to work on level
1 verse level 9 stuff. "How do I scale this to be used by 10,000 people?"
isn't even an interesting/relevant question to a researcher pursuing level 1
areas of science, but it's one of the most important questions for an engineer
of a technology at level 9.

------
lifeisstillgood
It seems to me that Silicon Valley's unicorns are themselves turning into
incubators for future spin offs. Uber is taking a ridiculous amount of funding
and investing in what can barely be called related technologies. It's not a
conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC. It's ... Something
new. And it's not alone.

Google, Amazon, AirBnB for heavens sake, all are placing bets on future
innovations and models a long way from their core. I don't have a problem with
this, but it's going to have a lot of knock on impacts. From traditional
business valuation techniques to how to tax R&D globally, we are going to see
a few decades where unfair and undemocratic could be the global theme, or, we
could see better forms of governance emerge.

This, Uber going robotics crazy, is for me just a trigger to realise what has
been going on for a while, from Pikkety to Varoufakis, tech has emerged from
nice career to political engine of the next decades.

The boy has started saying the emperor has no clothes on. We the people need
to know how to deal with a naked emperor and a new species of global
something's. We the developers are not isolated from the political effects of
the fun technologies we work with.

Gosh I'm pontificating now ...

~~~
beambot
Robotics for Uber is not a "barely-related technology." For a lot of us, it
was always obvious that the core operational model for autonomous cars was
Uber-esque. The fact that every major automaker is investing heavily in
autonomy should convince you that autonomous cars are an existential threat to
Uber.

(Not to mention that the driver situation is one of Uber's biggest issues at
the moment!)

~~~
seiji
Everybody thinks Uber wants to make robotic cars so everybody will just use
uber robotic cars.

But, why won't people buy their own robotic cars and put them on day time
"search" mode for fares that get directly paid back to the owner of the
vehicle? Then the vehicle can still return home for evenings/weekends when
real people need immediate on-demand driving without waiting to be picked up.

~~~
cowsandmilk
why don't people have their home computers automatically join cloud computing
clusters during the day so they can be used and paid for computation while the
people are at work?

~~~
robotresearcher
Because the cost of moving the data to the computer is too high. Locality is
king. My private car is parked, unused, near potential customers right now.

------
dpieri
As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm
confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run.

The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of
partnering with companies like Uber in the future.

~~~
angelbob
I'm a CMU grad as well. And CMU has a long and storied history of being raided
for talent like this. 40 at once is unusually big, but this story plays out
regularly.

It's good for the profs, it's mostly good for the school, and it's part of why
we have such a good reputation in industry -- so it's good for alums like you
and me personally, as well.

With that said, sure, 40 is a lot. But the Robotics Institute will recover.

------
EGreg
Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's
why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research.
The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open
source model was based on.

Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up
by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented,
it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research.

So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these
researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be
an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers
won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose
results are less monetizable.

The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken
away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be
able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose
whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY!
Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they
helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the
profits will go to the private sector.

I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public
essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the
best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research
could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if
these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot
further.

Replace patents with prizes.

------
atomical
What's the connection between Uber and Robotics? Computer vision for driving?

~~~
Nilef
Computer vision for self-driving, then longer-term, automating logistics.
Something has to load all those self-driving trucks...

------
3pt14159
This happened to the University of Toronto's Machine Learning lab. Microsoft
just came in and handed out salary offers to everyone. Makes complete sense
compared to buying out an actual company.

------
bliti
Hopefully this will drive more funding to privately funded research by non-
academic groups. I've struggled with such issue in the past.

------
elektromekatron
Excellent. I shall dig it out from under the stairs then and give it a bit of
a dust.

