One of the acquisitions (SCHAFT, Inc.) is a competitor in the current DARPA Robotics Challenge, and out of all of the teams that have shown off progress videos, SCHAFT has shown the greatest level of competence in handling the tasks as they're going to be structured at the Trials in Homestead in a few weeks. Very similar to what they did with the top team from the last DARPA Grand Challenge (self-driving cars).
There is a great documentary talking to the guys who engineered the robot. Interesting story they are a couple of research students at University of Tokyo wanting to develop the robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, but there is a rule at the University that no military funded projects are allowed. So these guys are doing it independently, pretty awesome guys I wish them the best. In the documentary[1], you can see how SCHAFT robot works in detail.
From my roots in a Michigan automotive city, the first thing this makes me think about is the massive amount of jobs this will eliminate if successful. We will need drastic changes in social policy to make up for it, and I have absolutely no faith in the government and voters to make it happen. I find the idea of replacing millions of labor and service jobs with cheap robotics before the world is ready to accept the consequences terrifying.
If a job is so simple, repetitive and brainless that it can be automated, it's in humanity's best interest that it gets automated, and people are freed to do something more useful. Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying.
If you look at the history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs, not a lack of jobs.
Think back to the Horse & Buggy days, when cars came along, I'm sure people were saying "with all these cars not needing horses, all those people that care for and breed horses will be out of work", but look at all the jobs that were created, and particularly the jobs you're now concerned have been lost in Detroit.
I think Detroit may be a bit of a special case as the population boom there was driven by the growth of the Automotive industry at a time when everything needed to be centralised. Almost everything was decentralised before (with the majority of jobs being in Agriculture I believe), so we had a short period of history with mass centralisation and we are now able to decentralise again, so the places that amassed workers geographically look so much worse off by comparison, while going through massive change.
Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.
Terrying in the same way as replacing millions of farm workers with automation has been in the past century? Or the automation of the wool industry in the 19th century?
That's some very unimaginative thinking there. Large scale industrial automation is a Good Thing for humanity.
Automation in manufacturing has been with us for a century or so and its effects have made more and more sophisticated material possessions available to larger and larger markets. More part content, more sophisticated parts, lower and lower cost, more features and therefore, more value to the buyer. Or, in another vein, more food available to more people, better sorted, safer, more consistent quality and attributes.
Automation does reduce the human labor content in the goods we purchase, but at the same time, it reduces the cost of those goods so that more units are sold and more people can afford them. Less human labor per item, but many more items.
It is not like the robots will raise from the ground. Someone will have to build them.
The fact that Michigan industry died, is pretty much political. Tech changes helped a little, but in the end, it was all political. I am talking about grants and tax incentives and what not that happens behind closed doors in exchange for campaign support.
I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but at I/O during his Q&A Larry Page talked a fair bit about how he wants to see manufacturing get more streamlined, Maybe this could be related?
> Smartphones, Page said, are “relatively expensive,” with the raw material costs — glass and silicon — is “probably like $1, or something like that. I think glass is 50 cents a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much. So I think when I see people in industry making things, I ask this question, how far are you off the raw materials costs. So as an engineer, trying to go to first principles, what is the real issue? What’s the real issue around our power grids, or around manufacturing? I think a lot of people don’t ask those questions, and because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, that’s almost impossible to do. But if you took a fifty-year view, you’d probably make the investments you need to, and you’d probably even figure out how to make money. So, I encourage non-incremental thinking.”
I manufacture things out of steel. Steel costs 50 cents a pound for sheet and $2 a pound for welding wire. The freight to ship it to my distributors is another 50 cents a pound, and the advertising and marketing cost is about $2 a pound.
So ultimately I agree with Page. The cost of manufacturing anything goes on along a 1/x curve over time, and approaches the raw material cost. Its the other costs that don't do that, like engineering talent, marketing spends, warehousing, shipping.
Recently google also created a company to develop software for the construction industry, which they claim will reduce 30%-50% of the cost of construction[1].
The most likely scenario for that to happen is through pre-fabricated construction, meaning most of the construction happens in a factory. This fits perfectly well with robotics.
I can imagine a scenario, they would be like 3D printers for houses. You provide the materials (think big legos), and the robots (X-copters may be) assemble everything.
Google's not an ad company, they're an AI company. Ads just support them as they develop the tech. Articles like this keeps reinforcing that world view for me.
Hypothesis? The web market is becoming more saturated and lower margin. They're fishing around for something sufficiently hard (capital intensive to keep agile players out) that will have bigger long term payoffs.
They have powerful nerds with money combined with constant internal reorgs due to backstabbing politics.
"stepped down" is the corporate version of political "to spend more time with his family."
"You don't want me here? Fine! I'll go make my own org with my own cost center and blackjack and subordinates to sleep with. In fact, forget the new org."
Well this explains why I was contacted twice. My expertise is in robotics and each time I asked them why they were interested, since I wasn't aware of much robotics work at Google (other than self-driving cars.) First time I asked the recruiter to email me so I could contact him at a more appropriate time -- I was at work -- and never hard from him. Second time was by email, and I responded but never got a reply. Oh well. I just don't understand why they would get my hopes up and then never respond -- anyone know how Google recruiters work?
... or they just have vision, like companies of old times used to (HP, Xerox, IBM).
IBM has done basic science research like few companies ever have and nobody can claim they're planning to replace their current lines of business with electron microscopes or Watsons.
Better to use your resources while you have them to try to ensure your survival rather than nonsense like stock buybacks. If investors don't like it, they're welcome to buy an Alcoa or P&G or any other bluechip monolith.
Investing a lot of money in something that won't payoff for 10 years or so probably means they're not desperate.
Perhaps it looks that way to someone who doesn't understand anything about business, but there are easier ways to make money than investing in a lot of long-term research that might not pay off.
Or supplement it at the very least. The profitability they enjoy with advertising is hard to achieve in any other existing industry, so they try to be a front runner for new industries: Self-driving cars, robotics and green energy.
That is not to say they do not believe in the ad business. For the ad business the model seems to have moved towards getting more people online and have them do more online. Google put a smartphone into a billion hands. They wire up African and American cities to fiber. They made browsers far more capable and performant. They plan to fly balloons over the whole globe. All investments connected to the online business.
If you can get 45 billion pa out of robots in the next fiscal, please tell me how and I will help :-)
Yes, of course they are, but they have the luxury of telling the ad world, actually you have as much as you can get, there is no more growth there, pay up for a decade till someone beats us, by which time robots and cars and space stuff ...
We might have Motorola phone that's "Make in USA by GoogleBot" soon. Google probably can overtake Foxconn and it can scale up/out to build $90, $60, $40 Android phone.
That whole "Larry Page disappearing for a month" thing was probably when they replaced him with a real Android to take control of the company. Now that I think about it, his latest speech at Google I/O - when he "returned" - sounded pretty robotic, too.
I agree. It seems to me that robots have the potential to have a greater impact than the internet, social, mobile. And that's not to diminish the profound change those innovations have brought about.
It just seems that the ability to act in the physical world will bring incredible, profound changes.
Although this is somewhat unrelated, I have to say: my main concern upon seeing that Bot & Dolly / Autofuss were part of this list is what will happen to Front (http://www.autofuss.com/news). I find myself there nearly every day for coffee, along with a batch of other familiar hacker faces.
I'm excited for the parent companies, and mostly find it funny that an acquisition may affect something I would usually think of as totally unrelated.
I love the speed at which they're pushing technology forward, but I'm also pretty worried that they're taking the lead in any industry that'll be a game changer in the future. They're getting seriously far ahead of everyone else.
Even if they shut down everything for a single day these days, chaos would ensue. I wouldn't want society to be even more dependent on a single company..
[+] [-] dljsjr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheLegace|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKiXM7bUypk&t=25m0s
[+] [-] Wohlf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpatokal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|12 years ago|reply
Think back to the Horse & Buggy days, when cars came along, I'm sure people were saying "with all these cars not needing horses, all those people that care for and breed horses will be out of work", but look at all the jobs that were created, and particularly the jobs you're now concerned have been lost in Detroit.
I think Detroit may be a bit of a special case as the population boom there was driven by the growth of the Automotive industry at a time when everything needed to be centralised. Almost everything was decentralised before (with the majority of jobs being in Agriculture I believe), so we had a short period of history with mass centralisation and we are now able to decentralise again, so the places that amassed workers geographically look so much worse off by comparison, while going through massive change.
Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.
[+] [-] eliben|12 years ago|reply
That's some very unimaginative thinking there. Large scale industrial automation is a Good Thing for humanity.
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|12 years ago|reply
Automation does reduce the human labor content in the goods we purchase, but at the same time, it reduces the cost of those goods so that more units are sold and more people can afford them. Less human labor per item, but many more items.
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
The fact that Michigan industry died, is pretty much political. Tech changes helped a little, but in the end, it was all political. I am talking about grants and tax incentives and what not that happens behind closed doors in exchange for campaign support.
[+] [-] grey|12 years ago|reply
> Smartphones, Page said, are “relatively expensive,” with the raw material costs — glass and silicon — is “probably like $1, or something like that. I think glass is 50 cents a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much. So I think when I see people in industry making things, I ask this question, how far are you off the raw materials costs. So as an engineer, trying to go to first principles, what is the real issue? What’s the real issue around our power grids, or around manufacturing? I think a lot of people don’t ask those questions, and because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, that’s almost impossible to do. But if you took a fifty-year view, you’d probably make the investments you need to, and you’d probably even figure out how to make money. So, I encourage non-incremental thinking.”
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/05/15/google-c... (The first transcript I could find)
[+] [-] gregpilling|12 years ago|reply
So ultimately I agree with Page. The cost of manufacturing anything goes on along a 1/x curve over time, and approaches the raw material cost. Its the other costs that don't do that, like engineering talent, marketing spends, warehousing, shipping.
[+] [-] cma|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hershel|12 years ago|reply
The most likely scenario for that to happen is through pre-fabricated construction, meaning most of the construction happens in a factory. This fits perfectly well with robotics.
[1]http://www.construction-manager.co.uk/news/googles-cloud-bas...
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huherto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil421|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalsh|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mccr8|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kev009|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamb_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|12 years ago|reply
"stepped down" is the corporate version of political "to spend more time with his family."
"You don't want me here? Fine! I'll go make my own org with my own cost center and blackjack and subordinates to sleep with. In fact, forget the new org."
[+] [-] pdog|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision
[+] [-] rfnslyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radarsat1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mariusz79|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daishiman|12 years ago|reply
IBM has done basic science research like few companies ever have and nobody can claim they're planning to replace their current lines of business with electron microscopes or Watsons.
[+] [-] cylinder|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps it looks that way to someone who doesn't understand anything about business, but there are easier ways to make money than investing in a lot of long-term research that might not pay off.
[+] [-] snrip|12 years ago|reply
That is not to say they do not believe in the ad business. For the ad business the model seems to have moved towards getting more people online and have them do more online. Google put a smartphone into a billion hands. They wire up African and American cities to fiber. They made browsers far more capable and performant. They plan to fly balloons over the whole globe. All investments connected to the online business.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|12 years ago|reply
Yes, of course they are, but they have the luxury of telling the ad world, actually you have as much as you can get, there is no more growth there, pay up for a decade till someone beats us, by which time robots and cars and space stuff ...
[+] [-] qbrass|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyplee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpadkins|12 years ago|reply
Google is actually not in the lead (yet).
[+] [-] hopp_check|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] salient|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beauzero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riggins|12 years ago|reply
I agree. It seems to me that robots have the potential to have a greater impact than the internet, social, mobile. And that's not to diminish the profound change those innovations have brought about.
It just seems that the ability to act in the physical world will bring incredible, profound changes.
[+] [-] state|12 years ago|reply
I'm excited for the parent companies, and mostly find it funny that an acquisition may affect something I would usually think of as totally unrelated.
[+] [-] MildlySerious|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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