It’s reported that Google’s parent company Alphabet is selling the pioneering robotics company Boston Dynamics, less than three years after acquiring it in 2013.
I’ve had some fun making jokes about Boston Dynamics, and the Terminator-style future suggested by their two and four-legged robots.
Now it appears that the PR division at Alphabet actually took the creepy factor seriously.
“There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs”, wrote one PR executive in an internal email leaked to Bloomberg News.
She was referring to the latest video published by Boston Dynamics in February, in which a man pushed a two-legged robot with a stick to test its ability to recover its stability, while another humanoid robot had a box it was carrying repeatedly knocked out of its hands.
Watching the video it’s hard to avoid the feeling as if the machines are being ‘teased’!
[youtube]https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY[/youtube]
Reports today indicate that Alphabet had already decided to sell Boston Dynamics, after the remainder of the company’s Replicant robotics division was folded into the Google X research division in December.
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About the Author: Conn Ó Muíneacháin
