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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if is because the author is trying to be accessible, or genuinely doesn't understand AI but the writing eregiously understates the difficulty of human level machines.

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.

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Hi there, author here -- mostly trying to be accessible. And I think in the tech community it is well understood that robotics is hugely difficult, but it seems like general public pretty much equates progress in software AI with progress in robots, which is clearly not the case. We thought it might be helpful to highlight this to people who aren't hugely technical.

Thanks and it makes good sense in that context.

That said, I do fundamentally believe that there are some things that the "general public" will never wrap their heads around. Feynman had a great take on this when trying to explain why he can't just describe magnetic forces [1]. I'd be curious to hear your take on that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmtJpzoW0o

I'm an optimist in this area - people like Wait But Why and XKCD (eg - https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/) - show that most complex subjects can be explained in simple language that most people with an average education can understand. (An aside: I recently wrote an article about the use of D-Wave quantum computers on Wall Street and that experience gave me a sense of how tremendously difficult it can be to simple summarize an inherently technical topic. I estimate it took about five hours of study to be able to write a couple of accurate sentences I felt comfortable with.) Whether the general public has the inclination to take the time to understand this stuff is another question entirely!

I think Google is selling BD (and is putting all of the BD propaganda out) because the BD robots are 1) fairly useless outside of military applications and 2) BD is a ghost town because Andy left and took a lot of the brainpower with him.

For Google, selling BD now is probably the last possible time BD will be worth money.

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