Why Google Wants to Sell Its Robots: Reality Is Hard

Google has many divisions working on unprofitable long term research projects, so clearly that's not the reason. I don't think it's fear of humanoid AI - this doesn't seem like something the founders of Google would fear.

This is much harder than you'd think.

Here's a fun story from 15 years ago when a friend of mine tried to do some simple AI:

His goal was to have a humanoid shape created is software learn how to walk using simple AI. The idea was that it would obey some basic laws (gravity, the limits of its joints, etc.), do something random, check whether or not it was closer to the goal of walking, tweak its parameters, and iterate. The chosen goal was not to fall over.

He set up the program, let it run over the weekend and let it do millions of tries. Hopefully when he came back to the office it would have learned how to walk, or at least stand up without falling.

His disappointment was huge when he came into the office: The simulated robot was sitting down with its knees bent, thus having achieved the goal of not falling over.

If I had to summarize what the article said: "Google tried these robots but are selling them because it turns out to be hard to make robots that are as capable as humans." Which is like saying "it turns out that making humans immortal is really hard."

I doubt that is why Google is selling BD. My guess is that it was a combination of things: BD was a cost center with no commercialization roadmap, someone on the board got spooked about stupid AI risks, with the alphago wins it might start looking too scary for the public.

I think it was a terrible idea for Google, but is great for the robotics world as the behemoth is scaling back totally taking over the world.

Perhaps the car situation and this are forcing them to rethink some of their plans.

Why are drones (3D evolution) and electric train (1.xD evolution) easy to build?

Well in the case of drones makers don't care about limiting the movements so rules of feedbacks are easy. In case of train, it is even easier.

It is all about the size of the decision tree and the number of input(sensors)/output(effectors) that are coupled you need to control. There probably is a metric to give you the domain of "accessible" low hanging fruits of automation that can be set according to the domain.

General purpose automates are at best expensive, at worst a scam (see the mechanical Türk).

One way to make bots efficient is to specialize them. Hence the Jacquart mecanic computer that created the industrial revolution of 1830 and set the workers on fights and created the conditions for WWI.

I guess no one saw the problem of efficiency still exists even with infinite R&D budget.

The problem of robots is by requiring quite a lot of investment for their deployment they set an unfair competition between people being backed up by capital and innovative self made man without capital.

That was the reason to be of the Luddites.

This seems like a case of a merger/acquisition that just didn't work out. Hopefully it's for the best. The military robots that BD makes have the potential to save a lot of lives and do good, in combat and non-combat situations. Ultimately, Google/Alphabet is an advertising company. Maybe it's better for Boston Dynamics to go their own way. They can still maintain a relationship with Google and other companies to share AI knowledge and technology.

This is an interesting statement, because I assumed that it was the software that ran the robots that was hard to get right.

"But Boston Dynamics’s creations were not quite as advanced as people assumed. The main problem the company had solved was getting its machines to move in a realistic manner, said a person familiar with the company’s technology, but full autonomy is far away. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, said as much in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in February, when he acknowledged that in the videos, a human steered the robot via radio during its outside strolls."

So basically what they created was fancy R/C toys, not real autonomous and potentially beneficial robots that could do real work? Creating realistic movement is a hard problem, and the associated electronics and algorithms to move from point A to point B, but it's hardly novel.

Maybe this coupled with the fact a few others have mentioned the company was poor at working with other divisions is the reason why they want to sell it?

This seems kinda sketchy to me. It's possible we'll fall into a Robotics Winter, similar to the AI Winter due to these over-inflated claims of advancement.

I was expecting, after the Google acquisition, to see a new humanoid robot about now with Schaft's drive system, Boston Dynamics' balance system, and Google's image understanding system. That was the good outcome. Apparently Boston Dynamics does not play well with others, and that didn't happen.

Notice that Google isn't selling Schaft. I hope that they're doing OK. They're people from Tokyo University and from Honda's ASIMO project who felt things were moving too slowly. But they're in Tokyo, and Google may have problems managing remote teams.

As for "reality is hard", a good humanoid robot is mechanically at least as complicated as a car. Look how much engineering effort it took to develop good cars. Today, small teams can build a car, but that's because the problem and technology are well understood and you can buy many parts off the shelf.

Google has no track record in hardware with moving parts. Their autonomous vehicles have great software, but the hardware is purchased and bolted on. (Really bolted on; they do not bother to integrate the sensors into the vehicle shell, unlike every auto manufacturer that's done self-driving.) They're still using those rotating Velodyne scanners, which are a mechanical system that should have been replaced years ago. Flash LIDARs and MEMS LIDARs exist. Even the Google StreetView cars look clunky, and their backpack StreetView thing needs a redesign from GoPro.

I can see the cultural problems between Google, with no track record in mechanical engineering and a very young workforce, and Boston Dynamics, with good mechanical engineers and a 67 year old CEO. On the other hand, Google should not have bought all those robotics companies and expected them to make money Real Soon Now. Look at automatic driving. It's been 11 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge, when we first saw that it could really work. Nobody has a production vehicle on the road yet. It's a long haul with a big payoff. This isn't like the ad business.

If anybody from Google is reading this: you still have Schaft. Don't fuck that up. Thank you.

Why? Who cares about the aesthetics? The only thing that matters is if they can get the job done while being safe.

SkyNet is coming.