
Boston Dynamics employees were frustrated by Google's plan for a household robot - ilamont
http://www.techinsider.io/why-google-and-boston-dynamics-are-parting-ways-2016-5
======
burfog
Employees are people, with motivations.

I know this may be horrifying to some, but there are those of us who would
rather make a killing machine. We'll settle for a robot that carries supplies
for soldiers or watches the enemy.

Defense contractor employees are typically patriotic in a way that would be
really alien to the normal tech crowd. Part of the motivation is to do
something for the USA. Having Boston Dynamics get diverted to cutesy home
stuff is a decades-long setback for the nation.

There is also the matter of legs. Legs are cool.

Household robots are fiddly. They have to deal with a complicated environment.
They can't just look at a toddler obstructing the path and go "Fuck it, I'm
blowing that away, EAT FLAMING DEATH!!!".

Household robots are cheap plastic, with the shapes and colors totally
determined by marketing.

When you buy a company that pretty much makes weapons, what kind of employees
do you think you will get? Do you really expect that they will be happy that
you have "rescued" them from being forced to make killing machines? Ha, ha,
ha.... NO. You took away the coolness. You took away the awesomeness.

~~~
jug
I don't think this was a major problem -- after all, BD knew in advance that
Google isn't working for the military. However, the article claims Google
wanted a quiet wheeled robot for household tasks, which would ruin years of
research into bipedal (or more) robots -- the foundation upon where BD was
standing.

~~~
burfog
The top management got to make the choice. Clearly, the CEO didn't like
working for the military, or at least he made that excuse during the buy-out.

Some of the technical staff may have agreed. Mostly though, defense
contractors don't end up hiring the kind of people who hate defense
contracting.

Prior to the buy-out, if you wanted to make cute little household robots,
would you have applied for a job at Boston Dynamics? (FYI, NO!!!)

~~~
gregshap
Especially with irobot down the street and hiring all the time

------
Animats
Before Google bought Boston Dynamics, BD was strictly a DoD contractor. The
military wants big, strong, rugged robots, and BD was headed there. (Even
though the USMC rejected the Legged Squad Support System, the militarized
version of BigDog.) DARPA was providing much of the funding. It took about
$120 million to get to the good version of BigDog.

Then Google bought six robotics companies, including BD, which dropped their
existing customer base and went quiet. For several years, the robotics
community was wondering what great things Google was developing. In the end,
it turns out the answer was "not much".

The amusing thing is that Google/Alphabet worried about their image from
owning a company that makes a big humanoid robot. Google survived paying
$500,000,000 to DoJ to avoid felony charges after they were caught knowingly
selling AdWords to an FBI undercover operation pretending to be a Mexican drug
lord trying to take over the US steroids market.[1] It's not like Google has a
cuddly image.

If Toyota wants a robotics company, they should probably buy Schaft, which is
already in Japan, from Alphabet. There just don't seem to be civilian
applications for BD's hydraulic machines. Also, it's about time for Marc
Raibert, the BD CEO, to retire; he's about 67 now.

[1] [http://searchengineland.com/wsj-government-sting-google-
phar...](http://searchengineland.com/wsj-government-sting-google-pharma-
ads-109247)

~~~
notahacker
Utterly bizarre to think that Google is worried that videos of humanoid robots
behaving like big dumb pets present the image of a company developing
technology "ready to take humans' jobs" when they've invested so heavily in
self driving cars with the stated aim of altogether eliminating a large
employment sector.

~~~
Spooky23
Perhaps they are worried about investing billions and several man-decades into
tech that is producing $0 of revenue.

~~~
Fricken
That much was obvious when Google (Rubin) bought them. Expecting a commericial
product from BD in short order is absurd. Expecting them to abandon 35 years
of work on hydraulic legs and go back to the drawing board is worse.

I guess we'll never know what Rubin was thinking when he went on a shopping
spree with daddy's credit card; or if he was thinking at all.

Hopefully Toyota will be more accomodating; and maybe somewhere in the 2030
timeframe it will be time to start thinking seriously about commercializing
useful bipedal robots. A company with decades of experience mass producing
machines with 1000s of separate components I'm sure will be much better
equipped to handle that than Alphabet.

------
cm2187
A household robot that could

\- do the washing and ironing

\- cook meals

\- clean and tidy the house

\- take parcel deliveries

\- watch the house for intruders

\- feed and walk the dog (and tell him off if he does something bad)

\- change bulbs, repaint some walls while you are on holidays

Would be like a new revolution similar to washing machines or dish washers,
freeing up lots of people (mostly women) time and for instance giving them a
better chance to focus on their career. People would be queueing to buy one.

Less sexy but a much bigger market than another Terminator in my opinion.

~~~
lkozma
I'm genuinely curious: why would someone want to have a dog and have someone
else (in your scenario, a robot) interact with it.

~~~
trentlott
Our society is at a point where it can debate having robot butlers for our
cats.

What a wasteful time to be alive.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's still more useful than what 90% of startups are doing, so I wouldn't
complain about it. Being able to provide care and entertainment for pets in
situations in which you can't be with them is not a bad thing.

------
colmvp
I was curious as to why Rubin left Google.

I found this via a WSJ article from 2014:

> Mr. Rubin is an entrepreneurial spirit who likes to run his own show and was
> facing constraints on his activities at Google, a person familiar with the
> executive and Google said. A Google spokesman declined to comment on why Mr.
> Rubin left.

> “It’s surprising and sounds pretty unplanned,” said Scott Strawn, an analyst
> at research firm IDC. “If it was voluntary on Mr. Rubin’s part, you would
> think he would see part of the robotics project through to completion to
> have something to show publicly before leaving.”

~~~
Zigurd
He bought Motorola. Even if you've made the most widely used OS ever, that's a
fairly serious mistake.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Google got everything it wanted from Motorola. A phone manufacturer wasn't
what they were looking for.

~~~
Zigurd
Google got _out_ of owning Motorola at a $9.5 billion loss, modulo some real
estate and the patents.

The Nortel patent portfolio sold for $4.5 billion, which was higher than
Google was willing to pay.

Andy Rubin did not like what Samsung was doing with Android and wanted a
captive OEM. This doubled Google's headcount, it changed Google's financial
numbers materially, it cost a fuckton of money even at Google scale at a time
when it was apparent that no phone OEMs were very profitable, and it was
strategically incoherent.

Andy Rubin was exactly the right guy to make Android a success. But buying
Motorola and intending to keep it as a captive OEM was a large mistake.

------
dgreensp
_" As a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on
things that take ten years," Rosenberg said, adding that "there’s some time
frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses
and (that) needs to be a few years."_

This professorial tone is baloney. "A startup of our size"? You decide what
kind of giant company you want to be, Google. If you don't want to think 10
years out, why did you buy so many research labs? Own your decisions and
figure out what you want.

~~~
jonknee
... That's why they are dumping Boston Dynamics (which is the "startup" in
question, not Google).

------
ars
This article is kinda of empty. Lots of implication, but it never actually
says anything.

At best as I can tell Boston Dynamics wanted to just try things, and Google
wanted a household robot? Yet it also says that Boston Dynamics was worried
about generating revenues in a reasonable timeframe.

Very unclear.

~~~
XorNot
A military bot is a lot simpler to make then a household bot, ironically.
Soldiers can be trained to use a tool a specific way its intended (provided
it's ultimately useful). And the range of things a military bot needs to do is
actually somewhat more limited to mostly the things we've already seen.

I'm not really sure what a BD household robot would even do.

~~~
cm2187
Are you kidding? For every soldier in the field, how many households would pay
for having a robot to do their washing, cleaning, cooking, taking parcels,
caring for the dog, etc. It's a huge market. And no export restrictions!

~~~
notahacker
Sure, but it's also a competitive market, because cheap human labour is
extremely proficient at washing, cleaning, cooking and dog walking.

c.f. military use where soldiers lives are very _politically_ costly, and
machines can be much more proficient killers.

~~~
cm2187
That may be the case in certain part of the world (or even of the US) but if
you think of London or New York, a typical household can certainly not afford
to have someone full time taking care of these things. Western economies have
been converging toward rather egalitarian societies where domesticity pretty
much disappeared (and who would be the domestic to the domestics?).

~~~
notahacker
Living in London I can hire cleaners and people to move stuff at very
affordable hourly rates (the fact there's not an extremely popular Uber-type
service for it says something about the demand...) and get food delivered
whenever I want. And I'd expect sufficiently motivated humans to be
considerably better at those tasks than a generalist robot.

I suspect that the purchase, maintenance and software licence costs of an
extremely complex piece of machinery with incredible AI isn't going to compare
that favourably with a minimum wage human anyway, even spread out over a few
years.

~~~
cm2187
For the cost, you could say the same with all the technology packed in a
smartphone or a laptop. The fact is it has become very cheap once it is mass
produced.

~~~
notahacker
Cars, on the other hand, remain expensive. A robot with sufficient versatility
to cook, clean and walk the dog is significantly _more_ mechanically complex
than a car and likely exposes manufacturers to similar liability issues.

And if the hardware costs mean it's not a mass market product, the software
licences aren't going to be cheap either.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I doubt the price of cars is driven in big part by actual costs. Also, at
least in my area, you can buy good enough used cars for as little as $400,
which isn't very much money. A lot of people drive in cars that cost less than
a decent PC.

~~~
robotresearcher
Cars cost more than $400 to build. The used market does not pay for the
existence of things.

------
taneq
Google is seeing the writing on the wall about web ad revenue and is thrashing
around looking for a replacement cash cow. Reigning in their moonshot attempts
is reasonable but I think they're throwing the baby out with the bath water on
a few of these.

------
ghshephard
The entire article is very confusing re: Google/Alphabet - I thought that
Boston Dynamics now rolled up through Alphabet, and was totally separate from
Google. Or is the author just pretending/ignoring the Google/Alphabet reorg.
Or just doesn't know?

Regardless, seems like the sort of thing that should get a mention at least.

~~~
gedrap
I think it's just that even though the company formally is called Alphabet
now, people still call it Google and that's fine. Not like Alphabet/Google is
working hard on rebranding or something.

------
zaroth
The article claims BD didn't like Google's plan for a household robot _on
wheels_ because BD makes legs. This seems oddly specialized.

The bigger topic (probably not a revelation?) is how loosely integrated the
robotic purchases have been, and will this continue?

I wonder how much more tightly those teams will ultimately be integrated.
Acquisitions should ultimately be integrated and used to form the best teams
for internal projects, you don't get the benefit of scale if they operate like
an island...

Sounds more like, 'Google Takes Hands-Off Approach Before Hand-Off'.

~~~
keypusher
The entire BD tech portfolio is about making really good legs, including thing
like balance and recovery. So I can understand how they might be a bit miffed
when Google wanted them to build something with wheels.

------
CodeCube
What a shame ... as a non-psychic prognosticator, I feel like this will turn
out to be a strategic error

------
tacos
Of course they were. And I was frustrated (and creeped out) by their "wacky
robot dog prancing through the forest getting kicked by the handler" videos.

Evolution seems to tell us certain things about legs. I assume they have
reasons for clinging to this approach. But it creates an obvious perception
problem because, man, those videos are weird.

Google's got rainbows popping out of their logo meanwhile these guys are
punting pets. A culture clash surprises whom exactly?

------
WalterBright
Don't really want them deciding our fate in a microsecond: extermination.

------
eating_ice
So now Boston Dynamics get to make a household robot for Toyota.

Nice.

------
ommunist
Look, no SkyNet ma! They decided that making careere is way more interesting
than making robots.

------
optforfon
ahh, good ol' ageism. At least you're straightforward and honest

~~~
ivanca
Wait... if we select a 25 y.o. engineer over a 85 y.o. engineer it means
ageism? We must pretend that cognitive functions doesn't decline with age?
(Which has been completely proven as any biologist can tell you)

~~~
DanBC
GP comment was 67, not 85.

Can you show any links to reliable research ahowing cognitive decline is
inevitable in 70 year olds? Or is that just something you know and think is
obvious?

~~~
ivanca
Cognitive decline starts a lot earlier than 70, reflexes start getting worse
after 25, other cognitive capabilities decay later on in life

When does age-related cognitive decline begins
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197458009...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197458009000219)

White matter damage on diffusion tensor imaging correlates with age-related
cognitive decline
[http://m.neurology.org/content/66/2/217.short](http://m.neurology.org/content/66/2/217.short)

Evidence for cortical “disconnection” as a mechanism of age-related cognitive
decline
[http://m.neurology.org/content/57/4/632.1.short](http://m.neurology.org/content/57/4/632.1.short)

I can't believe I'm being down voted for this. Is like when someone says males
have naturally more upper body strength and then some feminists get mad, even
when is written in a biology study about musculature.

This obsession for political correctness is corrupting scientific knowledge
and research.

~~~
indymike
It's easy to see why you are being downvoted. You precisely expressed the
essence of discrimination and then defended it exactly the same way people
always justify not hiring _____ race/class/gender/etc.

Diversity requires you change how you think about talent and work. Change from
80lb containers to 30lb containers and then you can hire people with less
upper body strength while reducing injuries.

~~~
ivanca
I know what you are trying to say, but I have known engineers in their 70s who
have a really hard time grasping new concepts, and your splitting weight
analogy doesn't cover such things, you can't "divide a concept".

Yeah, we should be good with each other and nice with each other, but
sometimes that is not in line with how the market/capitalism works. I don't
think I was completely right but I don't think neither are you.

Brain plasticity is a real thing, and it goes away really quickly, is
depressing but is a reality, I'm 27 but I already feel my reflexes are a bit
worse than when I was 24, here is a nice video that gives some perspective
about the issue, you may have seen it before (reverse bicycle):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0)

