A lot of companies, with a lot of money, seem to think it is time for the robots.
From Wired, September 10:
As the head of Alphabet’s AI-powered robotics moonshot, I came to believe many things. For one, robots can’t come soon enough. For another, they shouldn’t look like us.
It was early January 2016, and I had just joined Google X, Alphabet’s secret innovation lab. My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired. People were confused. Andy “the father of Android” Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their “spare time.” Astro Teller, the head of Google X, had agreed a few months earlier to bring all the robot people into the lab, affectionately referred to as the moonshot factory.
I signed up because Astro had convinced me that Google X—or simply X, as we would come to call it—would be different from other corporate innovation labs. The founders were committed to thinking exceptionally big, and they had the so-called “patient capital” to make things happen. After a career of starting and selling several tech companies, this felt right to me. X seemed like the kind of thing that Google ought to be doing. I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs’ famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.
Eight and a half years later—and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI—it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on “minimum viable products” and VCs’ general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things. Here is why.
The Meaning of “Moonshot”
Google X—the home of Everyday Robots, as our moonshot came to be known—was born in 2010 from a grand idea that Google could tackle some of the world’s hardest problems. X was deliberately located in its own building a few miles away from the main campus, to foster its own culture and allow people to think far outside the proverbial box. Much effort was put into encouraging X-ers to take big risks, to rapidly experiment, and even to celebrate failure as an indication that we had set the bar exceptionally high. When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved.What set X projects apart from Silicon Valley startups is how big and long-term X-ers were encouraged to think. In fact, to be anointed a moonshot, X had a “formula”: The project needed to demonstrate, first, that it was addressing a problem that affects hundreds of millions, or even billions, of people. Second, there had to be a breakthrough technology that gave us line of sight to a new way to solve the problem. Finally, there needed to be a radical business or product solution that probably sounded like it was just on the right side of crazy.
The AI Body Problem
It’s hard to imagine a person better suited to running X than Astro Teller, whose chosen title was literally Captain of Moonshots. You would never see Astro in the Google X building, a giant, three-story converted department store, without his signature rollerblades. Top that with a ponytail, always a friendly smile, and, of course, the name Astro, and you might think you’d entered an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley.When Astro and I first sat down to discuss what we might do with the robot companies that Google had acquired, we agreed something should be done. But what? Most useful robots to date were large, dumb, and dangerous, confined to factories and warehouses where they often needed to be heavily supervised or put in cages to protect people from them. How were we going to build robots that would be helpful and safe in everyday settings? It would require a new approach. The huge problem we were addressing was a massively global human shift—aging populations, shrinking workforces, labor shortages. Our breakthrough technology was—we knew, even in 2016—going to be artificial intelligence. The radical solution: fully autonomous robots that would help us with an ever-growing list of tasks in our everyday lives.
We were, in other words, going to give AI a body in the physical world, and if there was one place where something of this scale could be concocted, I was convinced it would be X. It was going to take a long time, a lot of patience, a willingness to try crazy ideas and fail at many of them. It would require significant technical breakthroughs in AI and robot technology and very likely cost billions of dollars. (Yes, billions.) There was a deep conviction on the team that, if you looked just a bit beyond the horizon, a convergence of AI and robotics was inevitable. We felt that much of what had only existed in science fiction to date was about to become reality.
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