Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

I am a huge fan of spartan-like no-bullshit brutalist approach towards their marketing/PR:

  - No studio setup, just their lab
  - No artificial lighting
  - No fucks given about hiding the mess
  - Robots going through surgery in the background
  - Song is classy af IMO
  - Can see the camera man
  - Can see the engineers/employees
  - Framing/cinematography isn't as polished (this is a feature, not a bug)
  - Chipped paint, beaten up fairings

Generally, I love BD Branding/Marketing/PR:

  - Logo is on point. It's Da Vinci level stuff. Humanist 
    It is totally opposite of what they build, such an amazing contrast and deeply thought out [1]
  - One or two videos per year
  - No twitter drama like a lot of SV companies (Hey, Elon)
  - No excessive trying to get their word out. Their products speak for themselves
  - No purple/gradient bullshit and design trends
  - Their job descriptions actually make sense of what they need from you
  - Their CEO, Marc Raibert, exudes wisdom, calm and has a persona of composure (seriously, watch his interviews) [2]
  - No AI hype

Literally the opposite of Silicon Valley. May be I've had too much coffee and making lofty generalizations, but this is what I see! I also see the DNA of East coast/MIT/Boston rigor vs Silicon Valley cowboys - thoughts? :-) I live and work in SV btw.

I can't get over how amazing this video is. I hope it takes over the top spot on Youtube. It's got everything - music/tech/memes. The people behind BD marketing are geniuses IMO, although building an explosively-cool tech that appeals to all humans helps a lot. Outstanding.

[1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiNSPRKHyvo

You are the target audience for this marketing. It was made for you.

This is recruitment marketing. The goal isn't to sell the robots, it to sell the experience of working on the robots so that they have basically every need on earth lusting to work there.

My first thought was, "it sure would be neat to work for BD".

Even though I'm pretty sure engineers have been driven to tears trying to get a robot to do the mashed potato. Worth it.

Nerd lust: confirmed.

> The goal isn't to sell the robots

Their website has a tab called "Shop". I clicked, thinking one could buy t-shirts, perhaps a Spot plushie, but for $75K and change you can get your own robot dog. The "Buy Now" button is kinda crazy, like some user just happened on the site and Add-to-cart and in a week one could have this delivered in a box. It's only a smidge more than the Mac Pro.

It's a cool ad, but it doesn't seem to be "spartan / brutalist" marketing to me. The point of the ad is to show you how their technology makes robots dance. But, clearly their real product isn't just dancing robots. They put a lot of work into making this functionality, and all that work is just for marketing!

To me, a real spartan approach to marketing is spending very little money on marketing, and just focusing on your product. That seems like the opposite of what Boston Dynamic is doing, because they put so much work specifically into creating these PR/marketing videos. Many of their robot models don't seem to exist for actual products, they just exist for marketing.

One thing that's different is that BD doesn't have the pressure to sell to the masses, and they've been traded off from one giant to another (Google, Softbank and now Hyundai). I think they can afford to be spartan and truthful, I suspect a lot of big-corp marketing is based on metrics and data which drives you to doing unspartan things. My guess anyways, perhaps others can shed light.

> Many of their robot models don't seem to exist for actual products, they just exist for marketing.

Wow :) I was under impression that, while Atlas is a flagship model with broad purposes, the other two are rather optimized transporting (and some other miscellaneous functions) robots, for specific applications.

Why do you think they couldn't find use as products?

I think most of their robots are more research than product, except maybe most recent models like spot. It's first and foremost an amazing engineering for the sake of engineering.

BD is basic research. Figuring out what can be done and what the potential applications are. I’m surprised BD has gone through so many sales. Whoever owns them in the end is going to make a ton of money I reckon.

In the case of BD, the question seems to be what exactly is the end. Making walking robots is an incredible feet of engineering but one that doesn't seem to solve an actual industrial problem.

For a lot of use, as a mean of locomotion, they are fighting not only tracks but also flying now that multicopters are ubiquitous. Is there still a market for them? Cool research anyway.

Robotics already has plenty of applications. Travelling over dangerous terrain for mapping, search and rescue, automation of manufacturing where dexterity is required, lifting and manoeuvring heavy loads. Those few applications alone covers a lot of industries.

But you might also learn about how to build prosthetics, augment human abilities with exoskeletons. Who knows.

These guys will figure out all the obvious stuff and perfect it. And then see how far they can push it.

I don’t think you properly understand “spartan”/ brutalist. The video is using the materials in their most outrageous but possible form to demonstrate their flexibility, and executed in an imposing way. How’s that not brutalist?

But so much of the video is unnecessary flourishes, lots of excessive effort put in to make it a cool video, rather than focusing on the robot itself. It seems more baroque than brutalist. I'm sure it's a matter of personal aesthetic judgment. But I would consider robot videos like this one to be "spartan":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZMtKQ-R9II&feature=emb_logo

Go 15-30 seconds in. The video is obviously just showing an industrial robot at work. They didn't build something fancy just to make a viral video. It's just focusing on the components of the robot that do something useful.

It’s all very cool looking.

However when I watched this video my first thought was “my god they’re going to bring the drone wars to the ground.” I am a robotics engineer and have been focused on robotics my whole life. I worked at Google X on a robotics team with some great ex-Boston Dynamics people, and some of my friends have since gone to work for them.

So I do understand what they have achieved. It’s fantastic from a technological perspective. And I know they have non military funders now. There’s a great many labor applications for machines like this if they can sell them for under half a million dollars and get them to do real work. I understand all that.

But I fear that if the US military orders some, the company would happily oblige. Maybe they’ve committed to only peaceful non military use. But these extremely agile and capable machines to me seem like some military strategists dream come true. So when I watch all of this achievement from a company that for so long survived off of military funding, I am deeply saddened by the implications.

Delivery robots and warehouse workers would be great. But these seem like in ten or 20 years time they’ll be another extension of the US global killing machine. I dream of a world where we can use robotics to make the world better, and the potential military use here leaves me uneasy. I cannot celebrate what I fear will be the dawn of ever more inhuman military conflict.

It's weird to pick one point in the abstraction chain of human technological progress and create a threshold of unethical behavior.

Technological progress will gaurantee this scenario of military use. If not BD, it will be another company. If not now, it will. If not the US, it will be someone else - China, Russia, etc.

I don't see anypoint in feeling sad about just some geeks making robots as much as we didn't become sad when we saw the transistor being invented. The future is in our hands and tech has always been at the center of military warfare. Focus should be on government policy, electing good leaders and engaging in diplomacy over warfare.

I think it’s important to talk about the concerns related to military robots well before they reach deployment so the public is primed to criticize leaders who would claim their use will be justified. When should we talk about it if not on the release of amazing new capabilities sure to catch the eye of military officials?

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.“ - J. Robert Oppenheimer

ah the " If not us, it will be someone else " argument.

Let's replace that with other things to show how incorrect this logic is.

"If we don't enslave these people, someone else will"

"If we don't bomb these schools, by golly, someone else will!"

The potential hypothetical existence of others acting immorally simply isn't a valid ethical argument to act immorally.

In the same way the response is "how about if instead nobody bombs the hospital" the response here is "how about if instead nobody builds armies of killer robots"

"no death cyborgs" sounds like a pretty easy ask for humanity. This should be well within reach.

That’s not even a remotely close analogy, no offense meant. Robots can be used for many good purposes. Intel makes processors, they can be riding on a missile or used on a CT Scan. Bombing schools is only horrific, how do you come up with this?

I kind of wish we would just enjoy this stupid video of robots dancing. It’s getting tiring to fend off AI-doomsday crowd.

The statement I responded to specifically focused on military application

"Technological progress will gaurantee this scenario of >> military use << . If not BD, it will be another company. If not now, it will. >> If not the US, it will be someone else << "

This argument is

"Technological progress will (always) lead to military use. If not us, it will be someone else"

or:

"The future is guaranteed to be full of war because of decisions made by humans that they somehow have no agency over. Because of this false premise, we need to be eagerly building weapons as fast as possible"

It's a classic argument and it stands up to no scrutiny whatsoever.

So instead the standard response is to generalize it through a deflection: "this is just general forward motion progress" which is exactly what happened.

That's not the point. It's the idea that the fundamental inescapable nature of humans is to be as violent and brutal as possible - which is not true - it's a choice, an act of agency, a matter of policy, it's a decision that is freely made.

Just getting to that simple realization, that barbaric brutal self-destruction takes choices, planning and intentional action that we can simply just choose not to do, would be a groundbreaking epiphany to most.

I'm pretty confident I'm going to die without murdering anyone, just like almost every human ever. It's not natural in the slightest.

This was my first thought as well. Watching them dance, I was thinking, non-jokingly “if they can do this now, what happens when these robots are dancing faster than the human eye can see?”

The Rat Thing has stopped. Which they never do. It's part of their mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what they look like.

(Snow Crash, by Neil Stephenson)

What happens if the robots can dance faster than human eye can see and can see your eyes in detail? Invisible robots - exploiting saccades to move around unnoticed.

See also: Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

Makes me think of scaling-up the techniques in this old video on a larger platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk

I was under the impression that the military were the main funders and intended clients; the robo mule in particular for offloading some of the increasingly heavy tech and supplies for infantry.

What happens in 20+ years when surplus ones are handed out like MRAPs to careless police departments?

The military has been the main funder, but as of late they've been purchased by non-military groups and have suggested their products will have use in warehousing and package delivery. I am being optimistic to hope they wouldn't see military use, but I think it'd worth discussing in any case.

> What happens in 20+ years when surplus ones are handed out like MRAPs to careless police departments?

Good question indeed.

I don’t have anything to do with robotics and this was my first thought: fear. I am afraid these will be deployed as war machines to kill people instead of being deployed to save people. I wish to be wrong.

> I hope it takes over the top spot on Youtube.

It won't because for non-techies it's just a random video without any significance. I tried showing it to my girlfriend twice and she was extremely unimpressed and uninterested.

Sorry for your failed relationship and also I disagree because their backflip video was a hit.

> It won't because for non-techies it's just a random video without any significance.

What a bizarre thing to say. Surely "non-techies" are able to extract some value from the video.

> I tried showing it to my girlfriend twice and she was extremely unimpressed and uninterested.

Oh, well, if your girlfriend was unimpressed and uninterested, we'll just extrapolate from that and presume the same for everyone else (at least everyone else's girlfriend).

>> It won't because for non-techies it's just a random video without any significance.

> What a bizarre thing to say. Surely "non-techies" are able to extract some value from the video.

Movies and TV have stolen most of that value and wonder by showing fake robots moving like this for years. My thought watching the video was "this looks like CGI", not because I think it is CGI (or the lighting or background or anything), but because the only robots I have seen move that fluidly have been fake computer animated ones. Because I believe it's not CGI, I was amazed, but that takes a little domain knowledge.

I suspect a lot of people already think robots moving this well are fairly normal, and not impressive.

>It won't

Well, looks like it did.

this is maybe a mean sounding comment, but its what i would have appreciated hearing in response to my own thinking along your lines- you sound like a total mark. i have this single comment to go on, so obviously im extrapolating. but don't let a company's marketing ever fool you into thinking you know anything about them.

They had pretty heavy studio lighting in this:

https://youtu.be/wlkCQXHEgjA

Heavy study lighting? That's very clearly CGI.

I bet you believe all the vehicles racing around in automobile TV ads are real too.

They are real cars. You can watch them filming those commercials all the time in LA.

All of this is trivially explained by the fact that they are not a consumer oriented company so they don’t have to sell hype. Their customers aren’t average people chasing trends and reading Twitter. Nearly every b2b business markets in a similar way.

When you’re competing in a vicious field for consumer mindshare it leads to the marketing and self aggrandizing because you’re literally trying to capture the attention of stupid people.

100%. Metrics/data driven marketing for the masses leads to a lot of unspartan marketing. I can think of few brutalist marketing/branding - Berkshire Hathaway (https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/) is one, although their product is abstract - financial services. Any others you can cite?

Edit: MIT branding is pretty cool too: https://web.mit.edu/ and always have been, although this is B2C.

And maybe even more because they didn't even have customers at all until recently. In fact nobody wanted to even buy their business. Who's laughing now? (probably the robots)

Thank you very much, love this comment. Watching Marc right now!

It doesn’t look like they’re marketing their brand to me, more like they’re having fun.

Impressive rant, but you realize this ad is CGI right? The opposite of everything you're praising.

Or do you believe the cars in car ads are real too?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/cinematographer-reveals-one-...

This is the best compliment for BD.

Yeah, flattering and also annoying and sad. Marvin (HHGG) definitely had a point, we might see that rather soon.

You understand that CGI is only used for the very high end cars?

That comes from the article you cited...

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