A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Robotics

Symmetry

The YouTube videos will never stop.

But I think the author missed a trick by not including that time one of our Spots got shot.

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-dynamics-robot-do...

EDIT: And a link to the programming languages inspiration for this post if you haven't read it already.

https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...

modeless

The problem with Google's robotics acquisitions was that they fired Andy Rubin less than a year after he made them. They floundered after that.

It's clear that Google's management simply didn't have the patience to continue putting money into hardware development before the software was ready. They forced premature commercialization on BD and then dumped them on SoftBank. Strong top-level executive support could have changed that. I wonder what Google robotics could have been.

no_wizard

Worth remembering he was fired due to sexual harassment[0]. While Google did the right thing in firing him, they deserve far more criticism for the cover ups. Both of which are frankly unacceptable

[0]: https://archive.is/gmvI7

immibis

Given the choice between having a sexual harasser on staff, or missing out on a billion dollars of profit, every company in the world will choose to keep the sexual harasser, so it must be something else as well.

taneq

Halfway through and this is hilarious. Are you trying to tell me that AI originally stood for Anomalously-small Istanbulians? :D

Edit: Oh. In hindsight this (and other similarly snarky backronyms) is obviously why any time computers can do a thing it stops being “AI”.

gdiamos

Was this thing written by ChatGPT?

dmillard

Clearly not - it's quite funny (or at least I thought so).

Anyway, the author is a well known writer in the robotics world.

HN

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Robotics

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Robotics