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Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

Out of all the reasons I've read in the media, I really only see one legitimate (non-FUD) possible reason for Google selling Boston Dynamics: they didn't integrate into the company well. Not building the products Google envisions, and not working with Google's other robotic divisions, both seem like really glaring issues that would motivate splitting off Boston Dynamics.

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.

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This. Another article that was more in depth said that the other robotics companies Google bought were being integrated into other divisions. Boston Dynamics is the only one being sold off. For whatever reasons they didn't mesh well with the rest of Google.

It is possible that Boston Dynamics is still very tight with military contractors and technologies which may prevent separation. Google made it clear it does not want these contracts and associations.

What if a chip/software chunk in Atlas was made by Raytheon and any modification needs to shared back? Or access is not even possible.

> Google made it clear it does not want these contracts and associations.

They did? Google still does DoD contracts for supplying Google Maps among other things. I figured they didn't care.

Just my personal opinion, but I think Boston dynamics robots show a lot of potential in the near future for military uses, however seeing big dogs in the battle field could generate pretty bad PR for Google, a company whose motto is, still, do no evil.

I'm inclined to agree. Google probably does not want to be the company that creates Terminators for the Pentagon. Watching the last BD demo on YouTube, watching that humanoid stomp through the forest, I couldn't help but joke how terrifying it would be to see one of those things holding a machine gun.

> I couldn't help but joke how terrifying it would be to see one of those things holding a machine gun.

Funny thing is I would be far less terrified of it than a human if it were holding a machine gun because its human-like movement is so incredibly slow I would feel like I actually had a chance (even if I didn't).

However, if they embedded the machine gun into the bot itself (which I think is far more likely) then you could have instant targeting which shifts the terrifying back to the bot. It would also not look like it even has a gun depending on how they incorporated it and it could fire in multiple directions at once.

Ah, the future of war. So efficient and terrifying.

There are already automated "click to kill" turrets. They have a thermal camera and a gun, do automated target detection and automated killing. It's only due to customer demand that they have a human in the loop clicking the kill button. Having been within the firing range of one of those, it's a really terrifying feeling.

Which company makes these?

I think Samsung has a division that makes them for the ROK military (not being facetious, but possibly being incorrect)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AKZC-5dFWQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1

> Google, a company whose motto is, still, do no evil.

Seems to have been changed to "Do the right thing" to some extent when they changed to Alphabet [1].

Interestingly enough, I think that restructure also helps obfuscate where Google products are used. It's unlikely that any military robots would be Google branded. Instead they would probably fall under a relatively obscure Alphabet company that the average person would never relate back to Google.

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[1] http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/02/alphabet-do-the-right-thi...

> a company whose motto is, do no evil

Actually, it was 'don't be evil'. They've emphasized the difference in the past; but in any case, Alphabet replaced it with "Do the Right Thing"[1].

But yeah; Alphabet is probably unlikely to want to be associated with the US military.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

They're already associated with the US government, it makes little sense for them to want to distance themselves from the military.

That's not their motto anymore, now it's "Do the right thing" which is more ambiguous in my opinion...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil#The_End_of_.22...

When they bought BD, they said they would "honor existing military contracts,” but that it did not plan to become “a military contractor on its own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456240/under-google-robot-ma...

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185570-google-finally-pro...

Yeh I agree. From the title, "Reality is hard", It seems like the media is portraying this as a failure for the advancement of robotics. Whereas I suspect google is becoming more confident about how robotics and AI will be best implemented and Boston Dynamics is failing to follow that vision.

> executives discussed the viability of AI techniques like teaching robots to do physical tasks, and how the Boston Dynamics group needed to collaborate more with other Google teams.

Seems to me Boston Dynamics was at the forefront of AI/robotics progress, too. Reality might be hard, but Boston Dynamics was definitely going somewhere.

Was it really, though? What I've read seems to indicate a lot of the algorithms were focused more on the typical top-down planning/searching paradigm, rather than the approach that is in vogue in AI today, which is learning algorithms for robots to learn behaviors.

I could easily see a scenario in which researchers at Google HQ tried to shift the research focus of Boston Dynamics and were told off by the researchers at Boston, though this is just wild speculation.

IMO you need both traditional top/down searching and planning as well as deep neural networks. AlphaGo is a good example of that kind of mix.

Furthermore, the mechanical engineering problems in robotics are important too. We currently have relatively bad robot platforms. Boston Dynamics has made important progress in this area as well.

IMO, Boston Dynamics is working on hard problems that have small mid term value. If your options is 100 billion in R&D or use wheels, the obvious choice 98% of the time is to use wheels.

Wheels are quiet, low matence, lower energy, well understood etc. Stairs seem like a big deal but roomba demonstrates if there cheap you can just have another robot upstairs.

I bought the primary focus for Boston Dynamics was military applications. I can see Google wanting to distance themselves from hat industry.

If that was the case then why buy them in the first place?

Change of heart?

maybe, or maybe this, Dec 2015, when the US military scrapped plans to invest in Big Dog http://www.headlines-news.com/2015/12/30/698664/defence-chie...

Irrational exuberance and/or lack of proper due diligence as to the extent of the ties. It must be great to have so much spare cash that you can do a transaction like this the way I might buy a TV and sell it on ebay if doesn't do what I thought it would.

Access to all of BDs secrets.

Agreed. I'm just glad some of the knowledge and know-how was adsorbed by Google before BD ends up as part of one of the military behemoths.

Yes, the whole smokescreen about "All our divisions need to have a near-term profitability plan" is just completely unbelievable. For one thing, Alphabet can certainly afford a few pie-in-the-sky long shot projects, and for another, they don't seem to have a problem funding Go AIs with an even farther payoff horizon.

My guess is that the Boston Dynamics folks wanted to work on bipedal robots, and the execs back on the West Coast were worried about PR fallout.

That, and it's not that easy to sell "Don't be evil" as your company motto when you're building unstoppable steampunk automatons for the DoD.

Erm, AlphaGo's payoff in technical terms is maybe far off, yes, but the PR was huge!

That's sort of my point... the PR they got from the recent Boston Dynamics video was significantly less favorable. So DeepMind stays in the family, while Boston Dynamics is out.

According to some sources, they paid around $400 million for DeepMind. Boston Dynamics only cost them a bit more than that. They could have kept both of them running indefinitely.

It's pretty easy to imagine conflict arising from how Google wants the software to evolve versus how BD has been doing it up to now. And that there could be huge resistance inside BD to disregarding their IPR or even practical/talent implications that were not obvious at the start.

Remember Google Glass. Google is worried about public rejection of uncanny valley scary robotic/AI. That could undermine acceptance of its AI projects.

On the other hand, it might help their efforts of making people skeptical of the big bad Singularity in which AIs make us their pets. But maybe commercial interests superceded their Singularity misgivings.

That's one good reason. Another is that walking isn't as valuable as it is amazing. Walking robots were one of the first dreams ARPA was created to pursue, because then you could make walking tanks that could walk through forests in Europe and fight Soviet Bloc tanks.

That mission isn't as important now, and it's hard to come up with a market for walking robots.

It could be because they didn't see much value in their technology...

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