Google Acquires Boston Dynamics
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
His company _is_ a military contractor. This willful ignorance is very dangerous. It is so easy for engineers and scientists to just say they are working on cool technology, not intending for it to be used as machines of war. As a profession we need to open our eyes and acknowledge that much of our work is being used for military purposes. (Especially if the military is the one paying for it!)
EDIT: Yes, I agree that some people are fully aware of what their work is being used for. If they support it then it's their decision. It is just dangerous if we try to hind behind the veil of pure pursuit of knowledge, and ignore the reality of the situation.
We, the builders of this technology, need to deal with the ethical situations before they get out of hand. I think robotocists need to develop an analog to the hippocratic oath, and embrace it as a profession.
Anybody who is involved with DARPA funded research. In this case it might be a little easier to the see the parallels between a robot and a war machine.
The Internet itself was a DARPA funded, as was GPS and they can both be seen as tools in war at least as this was there initial intent.
So while that does classify those who worked on them as military contractors, it is important to understand that its not necessarily a negative label and the benefits are sometimes felt years onwards after the military tech trickles down.
Which started back when they were still just ARPA, the "Advanced Research Projects Agency".
It's a bit aggravating that they had to tack on "Defense", as if their achievements weren't justification enough, but I suppose dissuading Congress from killing your budget is an important pragmatic concern.
Here is a great presentation on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASDkNdhUvuU&nofeather=True
You are right that we should however acknowledge that robotics work does have military applications and that some ethical lines will have to be draw as we are reaching a point where we cannot ignore them any more.
In an actual modern war scenario however they'd have to use every sneaky trick in the book or would eventually lose the war via attrition. Firing high explosive shells into buildings to kill the sniper at the top and all that.
For a long time, the Pentagon lumped counter-insurgency under the term "operations other than war". That bugs me. Counter-insurgency is war! We spend a lot of time optimizing for potential near-peer conflicts with countries like China and Russia. Maybe it's prudent. But counter-insurgency has become, for better or worse, a big part of what we do. We should not be so bad at it.
Very True!
"Like the ENIAC, the EDVAC[1] was built for the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eckert and Mauchly and the other ENIAC designers were joined by John von Neumann in a consulting role; von Neumann summarized and discussed logical design developments in the 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC"
A processor is general purpose. What if you designed a thermal / visible 1024x1024 pixel camera with built in optical flow calculator in a cerdip package? Even the boss man didn't tell you what it was for you could figure it out. You would be responsible.
Now that could be used to check heat distribution on a motherboard, so up that that point, it's benign, but the optical flow calculator nudges it into other territory.
An optical flow calculator means it'll be used in some kind of mobile system. That instantly cuts out most industrial processes, most consumer applications, and most scientific applications. It simply wouldn't be necessary there.
The relatively high resolution of it also points towards it being used in highly specialized applications. For comparison, consumer priced thermal imaging chips usually come at 16x16 pixel resolutions.
The last thing sealing the deal would be the CerDIP package. CerDIP stands for Ceramic Dual-inline Package, instead of the usual Epoxy that holds the world of electronics together. I haven't worked with them, but I wager they're only used in critical applications, stuff that shouldn't fail even if it's screaming along with 300mph through the sky, right next to a plane engine.
So yeah, either you're building a drone with it, or you're building a drone with it. It'd be too expensive for any other application.
Still, there'd be future consumer applications for the technology. The technology the new Kinect uses for example used to be reserved for spotting tanks in underbrush (I assume that's where tanks live and raise their young).
I ended up running into an engineer from Boston Dynamics and spent four months writing about his unique approach to solving problems.
The engineer, Jon, who worked on Big Dog as well as Rise, was one of the coolest and most inspirational people I've met. He explained how he struggled with dyslexia as a kid, and engineering, being more right brain-oriented, was a vehicle that allowed him to succeed despite his disability.
In fact, he later took a huge salary cut so he could become a high school teacher and teach engineering to kids, especially those with dyslexia.
But getting back to the issue at hand, I really enjoyed learning about Boston Dynamics during the four months I spent working on the story, and I think Google made a smart decision.
http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss03/p02.html
let me know if you have any questions or would like to talk about other animals, substrates, and/or differences between horizontal and vertical locomotion.
I'm wondering if modeling/simulating quadruped locomotion would help make this task a lot easier. Instead of trying some machine learning/computer vision on the pressure data, reason about what kind of walking pattern brought forth the results. Like a paw can't be in two places at the same time and other heuristics like that.
Any suggestions for literature I should read up on for horizontal locomotion? :-)
there's no substitute for the actual foot force data. i would collect this directly, in 3d (not just z-direction -- which it seems like you are currently doing), to understand the basics and then later involve simulations to iterate different designs that produce the desired motion and forces. i built a force plate that measures forces in 3d with piezoelectric sensors. it shouldn't be as hard with a feline because their feet have a reasonable distance between them (try getting only one of a cockroach's feet to be touching the plate at a given time to measure what forces it produces!). the reason why i have this opinion is that the most interesting part of comparing how animals run versus climb are the lateral forces. another interesting thing is that the number of legs is irrelevant (well except maybe monopod) because when studying two, four, six or 44 (centipede -- man those things are scary to handle!) legs, the forces reduce to a basic pattern we all share in common. when a centipede is sprinting, only three of its legs are on the ground at any time, so it's forces look identical to a cockroach or any other hexapod. when you have less than 6 legs, then you can observe the effective 6 legs by analyzing various portions of their phase. for example, when you walk (bipedal), when your foot is out in front of your center of mass, the forces generated are like the front feet of a hexapod (deceleration only). when you foot is near your CM, it generates forces like the middle legs of a hexapod (deceleration followed by acceleration). and when your foot is behind your CM, it generates forces like the rear feet of a hexapod (acceleration only).
there's more i want to say, but i'll save it for a subsequent comment :)
as for additional reading for you, i would take a look at Robert J. Full's research. there are a couple horizontal locomotion papers cited in the my paper linked in the prior comment that have phrases like "on the horizontal plane" or "on land" in the titles.
also, here's all the papers from his lab: http://www.polypedal.com/?page_id=163
and here's a link to one to get you started: http://www.polypedal.com/Images/PolypedalPublications/62_Dyn...
An example of what this gets used for are things like lameness detection or diagnosing disorders. Or it could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment.
While the pressure plate doesn't measure 3D forces, it does have the advantage of giving you information about the distribution, which I expect at least has strong correlations with 3D forces. Obviously you need animals of a certain size to get good data (or systems with very small sensors), so you wouldn't use it for gecko's or even really small dogs.
Perhaps I should try calculating the distance to the body's center of mass, to get an idea how well this distinguishes the different paws. The problem I'm having so far is that the quality of the measurements isn't always optimal and inferring which paws are making contact is difficult if you don't see paws from both sides (for quadrupeds at least).
I'll be sure to check out the research you pointed to!
The robotics expertise that Google is assembling is quite varied, which is really interesting. They already have stellar computer vision and machine learning people on the self-driving car team, and their earlier acquisitions cover other software disciplines like whole-arm kinematics (Bot & Dolly) and vision (Industrial Perception) as well as hardware like manipulation/grippers (Meka and Redwood) and actuator design (Schaft).
The Boston Dynamics team is probably the best concentrations of specialists in dynamic legged locomotion, especially by studying animals for inspiration. Marc Raibert, who started BDI, did stuff in the 80s that still seems incredible today.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/old-leglab/robots/robo...
I'm excited to see what they can do with the flexibility and funding they'll get at Google. I believe their previous funding was primarily grants from DARPA, which means lots of grant proposal writing, narrowly focused research goals, quarterly progress reports, etc.
The implications of taking this talent into consumer robotics (or augmenting their presence in the defense community) will ripple through the tech world.
Stories about it often end in a way that makes for a good story. That's not saying the same thing at all.
Additionally just the very act of being concerned about misuses helps mitigate them.
Or to put it another way, Google's computers plan the strategy, and Boston Dynamics' controllers take care of the tactics.
Here is a link to Boston Dynamics' YouTube channel in case any of you want to see some of the amazing robots they've built over the years.
Boston Dynamics' robot knowledge (and patents) combined with Google ability to create awesome software, such as their self-driving car, will be a great combination.
I'm not sure where going is going with all of these recent acquisitions. Home and office robots to make our lives easier? What in the heck are they up to at Google X?
The US DoD probably doesn't like this too much, considering that Google stated that they do not want to step into the government contracting sector. Boston Dynamics seemed like one of the most promising contractors for DARPA in the robotics industry.
IMO it's only a matter of time before Google steps into the cyborg industry. It's almost scary to think about, but it's inevitable and at least Google has some experience in dealing with products and services that are controversial, such as data privacy.
I was about to rip on Apple for not doing anything innovative or even remotely interesting in years, but it's sad to see all of that money be wasted on rounded corners, perfecting fonts, and scrolling animations.
It may seem like a waste from a technocratic point of view, but it's probably worth it just for popularizing and normalizing technology. If we didn't have that bump in style and usability in smartphones/tablets, people would be less comfortable with carrying around the internet in their pocket, there'd be less demand for tech like 4G, etc. Now people's minds are a bit more open to pervasive tech, and it may help adoption of whatever tech BD+Google develops.
"Within a year they had two demonstration projects that got a lot of media attention. The first was an autonomous humanoid robot that, given an apartment number, could walk through a city, find the building, ride the elevator or walk up the steps and knock on that apartment door. The second was a car that could drive itself door-to-door in rush hour traffic without any human intervention. By combining the walking robot and the self-driving car, the researchers demonstrated a completely robotic delivery system for a pizza restaurant. In a widely reported publicity stunt, the research team ordered a pizza and had it delivered by robot to their lab 25 minutes later."
this analogue doesn't seem to be there for learning robotics. if I hack on a robotics project, it feels like it's going to be more of a toy or a demo, and it is self contained and not something that I can share with others to use. sure, I can spend time getting a robot to solve a simple puzzle, navigate a maze, or whatever, but these types of projects seem so less motivating compared to the types of things that got me into coding in the first place: things I could share with others and that they would enjoy using. Are there projects like this? What are some robotics projects that I can build and learn from while and actually use and enjoy, today, relatively cheaply? I want to learn this stuff but it feels very forced to find that most projects seem very academic in nature and not "shippable" like even the most basic toy projects I did when starting out.
I went through Thurn's self-driving car class and started the mobile robot control course on Coursera, but the apex of these is at best a simple little robot platform moving around my house sensing tape on the floor. Even that will cost me $1000, in practice I will probably end up with just a simulation on my PC. Mindstorms looks cool but almost by definition it is just a toy. When can I build a robot that will perform real, useful automation that will improve my life, even in some marginal way, not just seem like a cool toy? How can I build a robot that will fetch me a beer or let the dog out or get the mail or something even minor that will make me feel like I am doing something with purpose and a real goal and not a homework assignment to get a robot to perform some meaningless task.
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Stepper?from=Tutorial.Stepper
http://arduino.cc/en/reference/stepper
http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-16-stepper...
turtlebot is like $2k, for example:
The next generation will probably be playing around with $50-100 robotic toys analogous to today's Raspberry Pi.
There are advances out there, but as long as one can't buy a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars it's not going to progress that much.
Also, there are shape memory alloys and they are essentially a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars. You could concievable bundle them together to make a larger muscle, but you will probably have to do some active cooling if you want any sort of decent response curve and even then motors can be a lot faster.
What I think we could really do with is a linear actuator with a simple built in clutch that doesn't take power to hold a position.
You're absolutely correct re clutching actuators. There are a lot of robotics projects out there that combine small devices with limited mobility to create a larger (multicellular) robot with higher mobility. All of these projects stumble on that particular aspect: maintaining a lock without consuming power. M-Tran, Symbrion, Distributed Flight Array, ...
I built an optical feedback robot arm for under $100 [1]. At work I use a robot where an individual sensor costs $100,000
The algorithms are much the same though. Doing control on cheap hardware is more challenging, so if you can do something on cheap hardware, you really have done something noteworthy! Expensive hardware pays for reduction of noise, it treats the symptoms of reality but does not solve them.
To truly solve the robotics issue of environmental noise, you have to solve it in software which is really hard but can be investigated cheap on cheap hardware. Robot projects fail because of software, not hardware normally. You should always build the software stack before spending lots of money on hardware.
[1] http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-contro...
Here are some cheap ideas:
1. Improve the robot arm control I outlined above. There is a huge market for cheap robot arms you could scale the ideas prototyped in [1] upto.
2. Active face recognition, put a camera with a zoom on a pan and tilt. Try to zoom into peoples faces for better recognition. Animals exploit shitty eye hardware with active attention in a way our current robots don't exploit.
3. voice activated inventory system for electronic components. Every hackerspace can't find the components they own. Popout a component tray via a push gantry behind it.
4. 3D hardware localization system. Actually determining the position of something is hard. Its the building block for gather training sets to do more challenging problems
But there is a real gap here: You probably don't have any problems that a simple robot would fix. You can buy a Roomba if you want. The killer app for robots is the autonomous car, and that is coming. No one has figured out what you want a robot for in that huge gap. Heartland has a nifty $20K robot that will do light handling tasks. You still don't want one.
If you can think of a robot version of the little software projects, good on you.
I think they will both be extremely big changes in different ways. Autonomous cars will be one big impact that indirectly touches many industries. Robots are going to get into everything, and the world will look very different at the end of it.
Robots will do farming, cleaning, food preparation, fire rescues, surgery, manufacturing. Basically, whatever parts of the world software can't eat, robots probably can.
A cheap, robust robot hand/arm would go a long way towards making this kind of robot-hacking accessible, but the bigger obstacle is that the generic computer vision building blocks that you'd need don't really exist yet (OpenCV is a good start)
The problem is that many tasks that seem simple (when you take millions of years of visual system evolution for granted), for example recognizing a sock in a pile of laundry, turn out to be pretty difficult.
On top of this, if a robot is doing the work it doesn't have to be the most efficient. Do it in stages... sort by weight or rough shape. Then a second pass does the "is this a shirt or pants" computation. Then sort those piles. Finally come back to "pairing socks". Or don't. It's already saved me a bunch of effort! Let someone else figure out what to do with a pre-sorted pile and I'll just add the firmware or another stage robot. It feels very "hacker ethic" to me!
Check out the videos on that page. There are a lot of obstacles to inexpensive robotic manipulation; the main ones are power-weight ratio and power-cost ratio of the actuators.
I agree that there is a real gap there - so a great contribution would be to fix the gap!
Compare hardware hacking. Until the last few years, it was pretty darned hard to get into. There have always been kits - e.g. the basic stamp, but they felt toyish. Lately though through a combination of Arduino, the explosion of hackerspaces, globalization allowing cheap and easy board design, and murky social forces entering the DIY electronics world has become a real thing. Gaps are being filled in at an impressive rate now... People are using Arduino to fix stuff that would have been a major project 10 years ago! Yes Arduino still has a tendency to feel like a toy (but less of one than a basic stamp), and, there are lots of projects that fill the space between it and DIY pocket computer... look at RaspberryPI or Beagle for examples - you can do a really good control system with them, python and minimal hardware knowledge.
So I suggest to you or anyone who wants to fill the gap - try to invent the Arduino of robotics kits. On your side there are several nice factors: easy access to 3d printing, widespread knowledge of the electronics parts listed above. Halfway decent free modeling packages (although engineering and simulation software may need some love). The opportunity is ripe!
Two reasons why I think the gap between getting started and being able to build something useful exists is that robot parts are still much more expensive than we expect them to be and the fundamentals of robot movement are much more difficult to learn than we expect them to be. Unfortunately, I think those two factors discourage a lot of engineers early on and is why the size of this community is so small.
I feel very fortunate that I have a Kuka YouBot to hack on. The company I'm trying to get started with two friends wrote a proposal that got accepted into the sponsored track of a competition Kuka is running. (http://www.kuka-labs.com/en/network/innovationaward/) After setting it up, it's clear why this is a 20,000€ robot. But before you can actually DO anything useful with it, you have to be able to understand kinematics and dynamics as well as how to get path planners to talk to controllers. And then the really powerful stuff becomes possible once you incorporate computer vision, which is also not an easy topic to understand. It not surprising that most of this work is being done at universities by grad students.
The state of ROS today feels a lot like what Linux felt like to me back in the late 90's. There are lots of issues with dependencies and programs not compiling correctly. Documentation is severely lacking. But there's lots of enthusiasm from very friendly people to help each other work to make things better.
What makes me worry is that many of the advances in ROS came from Willow Garage and Google is buying up many of the companies that spun out of Willow whereas a lot was made possible in computer vision due to the sensors made by PrimeSense, which was just acquired by Apple. I hope the Google vs Apple rivalry doesn't slow the pace of progress in open source robotics that was making the dawn of non-industrial robotics seem not so far away.
Extension projects : for instance, if one has a quadcopter and a go-pro, then the next problem is figuring out a cheaper gimbal mount (using BLDCs and a micro-controller/gyroscope).
You can buy inexpensive robot platforms, but they're small - there's a reason for this. Heavy, powerful components cost real money and someone has to make margin selling them to you, given they paid margin to buy them. High power and high current control systems (motor drivers, motors, etc.) are more difficult and expensive to design than small, low-power units.
But, there's nothing stopping you from seeing a design you like, and making it from the raw parts, except a lack of tools (in most cases).
> a simple little robot platform moving around my house sensing tape on the floor. Even that will cost me $1000
Huh? You can buy line-following robot kits on Amazon for $30, and there are even cheaper ones out there.
> When can I build a robot that will perform real, useful automation that will improve my life, even in some marginal way, not just seem like a cool toy? How can I build a robot that will fetch me a beer or let the dog out or get the mail or something even minor that will make me feel like I am doing something with purpose and a real goal and not a homework assignment to get a robot to perform some meaningless task.
Right now, buy some motors, buy some metal stock, bearings, shaft, pulleys, etc. and start designing a machine around them. Long before you get to the algorithms of running a robot, there are the physics of it, the basic electronics knowledge, and the design and machining.
> What are some robotics projects that I can build and learn from while and actually use and enjoy, today, relatively cheaply?
Small robotic arms are cheap these days - OWI and Lynxmotion make fairly inexpensive arms for learning, small wheeled bases like the Dagu Wild Thumper can carry a small arm for around $250, and are well regarded. You can throw an Arduino or Raspberry Pi in for control put together a Lynxmotion arm and a Dagu base, and for less than $600, you have a platform that can lift small objects and move them around. When you want bigger, make it yourself from what you've learned.
That's what membership in your local fablab is for.
Give it 5 years though and I can see home kit manipulator, teachable robot kits that you could program to maybe water the plants or dry some dishes.
This is very much a need. The Turtlebot is a low-cost ($1300) way to get a lot of functionality out of the box, though the lack of manipulator does limit what you can accomplish.
If you (or your lab/company) does have a five-figure budget for hardware, there are a number of very attractive off-the-shelf options which exist to prototype on: http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/#Portals
(Disclosure: I work for Clearpath Robotics, which design and manufacture several of the machines on that page.)
There is the hexbug spider which makes a nice, hackable beginner platform (http://www.amazon.com/HEXBUG-Hexbug-Spider-colors-vary/dp/B0...) with the addition of an arduino nano.
The kilobots are also cool (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/progSA/kilobot.html), and an even smaller, cheaper robot (http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/09/08/infrared-remote-contro...) using the same principle of locomotion.
There are prosumers making these types of robotics projects in their garages/local hackerspaces. There are many online forums where people sharing their builds as well, and many times these builds are actually used in production situations.
Also a high-quality robotics platform in no way needs to cost $1000. If you're on a budget just go to a local hobby shop, spend $100 on a chassis + wheels + motors and order some $0.10 sensors online.
For this reason, I expect the "personal robot revolution" to occur at the nexus of wealthy/non-litigious. I'm not quite sure where that is maximized on earth at the moment, but I'm quite certain its not the USA. (My current bet is Chinese cities)
Not only does this bring some serious engineering talent to Google's robotics initiative, this acquisition should create some interesting new interactions between Google and the government moving forward.
Google & BD are both researching machine learning, it only makes sense for Google to buy them.
Worth pointing out that Ray Kurzweil[1] is the director of engineering at google, Peter Norvig[2] is the director of research, and they recently snatched up Geoffrey Hinton[3] and several of his grad students.
Not sure if excited or terrified. The future of google is going to be very interesting...
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton
I'll take your word for it about Kurzweil. The wiki also says "a director" - good catch.
Here's what google says about Norvig though: http://research.google.com/pubs/author205.html
FWIW, I don't think reporting to higher ups (e.g. VP, SVP) precludes someone from being "the director" if there are no other people in the department with this title / position.
But yeah, Norvig is probably a little bit more than "a" director :)
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2011...
It would be nice to see some clarification on this from Google management. There's only so far you can go in high end robotics research before the pentagon comes a-knocking with wheelbarrows of freshly printed money.
in b4 "skynet"
Evil by whose definition is usually the question.
"Dr. Raibert has said in the past that he does not consider his company to be a military contractor — it is merely trying to advance robotics technology. Google executives said the company would honor existing military contracts, but that it did not plan to move toward becoming a military contractor on its own."
If they are owned by Google and Google honors those contracts, then this is the day that Google publicly became a military contractor.
That was my fantasy upon reading the headline: "Google acquires and renders harmless army of kill-bots"
Sadly, I'm afraid it was a dream.
Besides not everyone believes DARPA is "evil".
The more important one is that by not doing new work for the military, they have just remove one of the hottest companies from the defence market.
I wonder whether the US government has ways of withholding regulatory approval of this deal because of this.
My own politics aside, there's a pragmatic concern: the NSA is part of the DoD. If Google is fulfilling military contracts, then it's going to be hard to do that and to push back hard against NSA.
Maps, Self-Driving car, robots and a high quality analytics team. On top of that, robotic team comprises of various reputed groups with talented well regarded individuals. I look forward to the future. Also, how much disparity will arise in quality of living between North America and various Asian countries, or even Europe.
This is a crazy aggressive acquisition strategy. Does anybody have a list of the other companies?
Where could google be heading to? They already have self-driving cars and a big stake in Uber. Somehow I am missing a connection to a manufacturer that already has an established stake in the vehicle/robotics industry. All they have so far are design companies.
Google bought seven robotics companies in the past six months -
Schaft, Industrial Perception, Meka,
Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss and Holomni -
Isn't this list of acquisitions tilted towards mechanics and hardware for mobility? And less towards perception, intelligence, and planning? Do they think they have the latter areas covered in-house?
http://www.industrial-perception.com/
The common themes I see are:
- Movie industry
- Anthropomorphic robots
This is not aimed at utility applications, but seems to head into the human-machine-interface (HMI) direction.
The impact however will be as large as the Internet has been. Robots will impact the lives of every person on earth in the next three decades; from resource gathering, to manufacturing, to health care, to war, to self defense, to surveillance, to service jobs. There is no field that will remain untouched by robotics.
Fortunately no-one has invented AI yet.
Not that we know but if someone did create it, is it reasonable to think that an AI would soon learn that humans should not know about its existence and kill the creator by hiring bitcoin paid killers ?
Obviously the bitcoin will be acquired via hacks on wallet, mining on hacked boxes, etc
This is interesting because of the time. The Darpa grand robotics challenge is 1 week:
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121335
Now 2 of Google's recent acquisitions are A-list competitors. I wonder how much they paid for BD, and how much of a priority it was for Google to make the deal before the challenge and not after.
It's probably worth noting that both Larry Page and Eric Schmidt have invested in Planetary Resources.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources [2] http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/
They are trying to make hard scifi novels a reality.
To me, this sounds half-hearted. What does "on its own" even mean in that context?
Those BD robots scare the crap out of me. When the Big Dog video appeared, my first thought (within five seconds of seeing it move) was: Combat robot.
ps: I don't think there are, but well what do I know, direct development of 'attack robots' beside drones. Some unspoken fear of things going too easily out of control maybe.
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_Law_of_Robotics#Zeroth_...
If you give robots autonomy, they inevitably end up having to make moral decisions. For example, "Should I, an autonomous car, run over the elderly man or the girl with terminal cancer, those being the only two options?"
Asimov's laws (initially suggested by an editor, John W. Campbell) were a first pass at some principles for decision-making. Others have since devised more elaborate ones.
It's like everybody has the public methods what_is_harm() and what_is_a_human(), but how they're implemented matters, not the function signature. The laws of robots are just placeholders for something that never got written.
Words are tricky. What if robots decide that the best way to avoid harm coming to humans is to prevent any being born? So that means you have to rephrase it, into something like maximizing human happiness. Oh no, now they're injecting everyone with drugs and cloning humans by the planetfull. What now? Actual source or it didn't happen.. just creating an empty file called solution_to_the_problem.txt doesn't work, I tried it.
Words are relatively easy. Ethics are not reducible to lexicography.
> Ethics are not reducible to lexicography.
Nor is anything else, which was kind of my whole point.
We don't learn ethics by reading it as a dry description; why do we expect to build other minds that do?
This would be trivial to automate https://archive.org/details/AC-130_Gunship_Ops_in_Afghanista...
This video was linked to in that article, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/video-robo-weap/ hopefully every soldier, programmer, and engineer working on these systems has to watch similar videos so that they know the importance of getting this stuff right.
(Only applicable to sentient robots, of course)
You'd be surprised. I've done a couple of grants for projects that ended up being completely open to public and DoD didn't really give a shit about, despite providing some sweet funding for them.
But Google... that's a different story.
I'm amazed, but I suppose I shouldn't be - Google made a great choice.
Most of the people I run into today working on "big data" could still effectively fit the workloads in a single powerful MySQL box.
Actually, a lot of the math for 3d game engines transfers directly to robotics. Matrix coordinate transformation to/from each joint to figure out where/how to place it.
Also, play with Arduino some.
Amazon (through AWS) is already earning quite a bit of revenue from defence/military/nsa contracts (although I assume it's still negligible amounts).
My favorite from Boston Dynamics impressive creations is the Sandflea. http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html
If the planets align with Saggittarius, and they just might, crystal chakra energy will release thetans and quantum bio vibrations will slaughter thousands. Sylvia Browne's dreams will literally become reality.
1. In the Matrix, humans were not replaced by machines.
2. The Matrix was not a post-singularity world
3. Ray Kurzweil hopes humans will achieve {some kind of singularity}( it's not clearly defined) for the benefit of humans.
4. This news is about physical moving robots, it's the less relevant part. If you fear self improving AI then Google's usual software work should be what you panic about.
You're naive to think that the combination of Google and the work of a military robotics contractor is benign.
Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like The Matrix), “experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. - http://www.kurzweilai.net/singularity-q-a
This is not "humans being replaced by machines". All these claimed things are beneficial for people. You claim he actually wants something different to what he says, why do you think that?
You're naive to think that the combination of Google and the work of a military robotics contractor is benign
This is just throwing an insult at me. You aren't addressing any of the points I raised about your disconnected reasoning and flawed comparisons.
"Imagine a jetline with a pilot that never makes
a mistake, never gets tired, never shows up to
work with a hangover."
(he taps the prototype)
"Meet the pilot."
-- Miles Dyson, Termintor 2More likely: In 2020 they will fight on the outskirts of Teheran, after the bombing of the nuclear facilities in Bushehr.
If all Google did is run their search engine and ad business, they'd have a 50%+ net income margin.
For fiscal 2010, they printed $8.5b in net income on $29.5b in sales (28.8%). That's with all the other things they do that don't have good margins (or lose money) eating up their core margin.
Very few things have better margins than software (Microsoft once hit a 41% net margin, for fiscal 2000; nothing better than software monopoly margins).
Ad business and search engine are not selling software.
I said very few things have higher margins than software. Google's search engine and ad platforms are software systems, and Google is a software company first and foremost; they always have been, and always will be.
The extrapolated principle is obvious here. Google writes it once, and scales it toward infinity. The same principle worked for Microsoft with Windows; the same principle is at work for Salesforce.com or Facebook or Oracle, regardless of what we call it ("cloud"). This principle is what makes most software so profitable, per user there's usually nothing to uniquely manufacture or create. With scale margins properly skyrocket.
So whether we're talking about software search, or software retail, or an ad business built on software (eg Google's hyper automated ad system) or software services, the difference doesn't matter much.
And, Boston Dynamics had created lot of interesting robots such as WildCat, Cheetah, Atlas, Petman and Big Dog. We can see highlights of them at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4OCko9Ws6M
There were 2 of these today already for me(1).
Imagine if Boston Dynamic was a startup and asked for money for their research from a VC!
I'm not sure about this, but I heard that the Internet itself benefited from U.S. military budget at it's beginning.
Why not robots? Higher barrier to entry, untapped market. It is a place where a ton of capital can really shine.
I could actually see Apple doing a rather good job with robots. Making sleek, stylish efficient (servant|killing) machines...
On a more sober note. I see Apple as being likely to go after the home automation market. In fact I wouldn't be too surprised if they partnered up with an RV manufacturer to try out technology for the "iHome".
As for home automation, sure. I cannot see why these companies aren't trying to stake out the Internet of Things in the home more.
Robotics isn't a 'smart gap' market (where if only smart people would focus on it they could dominate it) there are lots of brilliant people already toiling away there. It isn't an advertising market.
In Asimov's vision of the future the robotics company that developed the positronic brain is the dominant corporation in the galaxy, and perhaps Larry is working on a positronic brain equivalent. But who knows. Maybe they are afraid of Bezo's drone army, or Musk's rockets. But why Boston Dynamics and not iRobot? Why a fragment of Willow Garage and not Neato? Why a self driving car but not Tesla? Lots of questions. Its a fun puzzle to try to solve.
What a bargain 800 million was in hindsight. And what a monumental effect the acquisition had.
It's hard to predict whether this acquisition could be on the same scale. But considering the space, it may very well be.
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-to-acquire-yo...
On that note... A driverless car can get a package to your driveway, but a mule can bring it to your door. A driverless car can scan every road, but a mule can scan parks and pathways. Reminds me of this http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/30/google-buys-bufferbox-loc...
There are plenty of fields that Google has entered that they haven't dominated.
I don't find the argument from features compelling because so many different services have the same features. On a broad definition, there are millions of social networking sites, but on a broad definition, the term becomes so close to meaningless that it doesn't tell you anything useful.
I thought I had seen all this before. Then it clicked. Only in the movies.
To see it real like this, really amazing. All you need is a nice dog custome over it.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ&feature=youtu.be...
There is NOTHING good for humans that can come out of it. Period.
The only question is whether it can ever be cheap enough to reap the kind of profit Google is used to.
BigDogs with streetview camera systems. Oh my.
The self driving car + mega ships + quantum computers + boston dynamics = what, war drones?
1. google realizes that robot technology is rapidly advancing, and they want to hold relevant patents
2. google somehow is thinking of extending the idea of google-now, i.e. a personal (virtual) digital assistant, towards actual physical (robotic) assistants
3. something else?