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Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

So basically you're saying that a robotics company that periodically ships impressive robot demos should be worth more than a weird video game for kids?

IMO while I tend to agree that achieving what Boston Dynamics did is surely the bigger engineering achievement, that doesn't say much in the company's position in the market.

Also here's a more positive narrative: Why not celebrate that online kids games are now evaluated more than military technology!

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>Why not celebrate that online kids games are now evaluated more than military technology!

I am not sure I get your point here. First, boston dynamics is not only for military technology, sure its initial and I think a lot of current funding comes from defense stuff but so did the Internet and early web technology's funding. So if we ignore that spin, the narrative is that online kids game is being valued more than advances in robotics. Now that does not sound positive in many ways.

Yes, valued... on the market... as a company... whose goal is to make money.

Ask any IT pro if they've heard of Boston Dynamics: yes! Do you own any Boston Dynamics products? No.

Ask a normal person if they've heard of Boston Dynamics: no.

Ask a normal person if they've heard of Roblox: yes! Do you own any Roblox products? Yes! My kids love it!

You can't take some highfalutin notion of 'potential progress in engineering' and directly translate it to market value. Market value comes from performance in the market.

Boston Dynamics is not a proxy for advances in robotics. It's a company on the market, and it doesn't have much business. Academic research continues to be valued and thus funded.

>Academic research continues to be valued and thus funded.

Is it though? Do you have a source for that? Now I understand its hard to actually calculate how much funding is going to which field, after all Robotics is an interdisciplinary field if there ever was one. Last year the AI budget in US was around 1Billion and another half billion or so for quantum computing. Those numbers are so small its astounding considering a kids game is valued at 29.5 billion american dollars.

edit: Source for numbers

https://syncedreview.com/2020/08/22/trump-slashes-research-f...

I think what you're neglecting here is that narratives are just subjective viewpoints. There's no one true narrative.

And my point with choosing a THAT narrative was to put the headline into a positive light: More money towards kids games than military tech! Hooray!

Apart from that, there's of course a very logical argument too. Which is that a digital economy like Roblox is a novelty. That means it's difficult to evaluate and often it's evaluated by its potential.

The economics for robots on the other hand are drastically different. They'll have to be researched, developed, built, and maintained. Whereas for any software: You write it once and copy it for "free" to as many customers as you want.

Anyways, anyone is free to pick and chose their narrative according to their liking.

I think that is a very weird way to look at it. I think we are using the word narrative differently. I used it as the "story" which fits all known facts. Cherry picking facts can lead to false narratives. Now my read that boston dynamics is a signal to indicate robotics advances may be wrong, after all I know very little about the industry, but then my narrative is also wrong. There are true and false narratives.

Sometimes, when I look at my "smart" robot vacuum cleaner repeatedly banging his head against my table, I think that this poor creature would deserve some of the behavioral innovations that video game characters got.

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