I’ve just filed an extended essay on the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials for the new online magazine Aeon. Check out the mag if you haven’t seen it yet: www.aeonmagazine.com. It runs a feature-length essay by an established writer daily, on a wide range of topics. It’s good stuff. My piece will run in the next few weeks.
The DRC Trials were the DARPA-sponsored competition for semi-autonomous humanoid robots, held outside of Miami in December.
The bots were babies this year, for the most part needing lots of human help just to get from place to place. But DARPA Deputy Director Steven Walker told me at the event that he fully expects the machines to be zipping around like the Boston Dyanmics LS3 bot pictured here, at next year’s DRC Finals.
The plot thickens for the DRC Finals, coming up in a year or so. Google has bought not only the winning DRC Trials team, SCHAFT, but also Boston Dynamics itself, which built half of the bots in the competition (multiple copies of a machine called Atlas).
Let’s see…Google’s driverless car project originated in a DARPA project; the company has bought the top robots of the DRC; they hired on former DARPA director Regina Dungan in 2012; and they’re working to establish a beach head in space (where DARPA got its start) through the Google Lunar X PRIZE.
Has Google become the civilian DARPA? And if so, what are the implications?
Ah….no.
As you know, DARPA funds all sorts of stuff that is far too risky and advanced for commercial companies. What Google is doing is profiting off all that and commercializing the technology. That’s all to the good.
Even the Google Lunar X Prize isn’t anything new. It’s trying to commercialize things that NASA did 50 years ago. Google’s investment are prizes that constitute only a portion of the cost of the mission. What they get is all the rights to the video, which they will monetize through search and YouTube. Its the teams that are really taking all the risk and doing all the work.
Google’s whole business model is profiting off the work of others. They found a way to monetize all the trillions of web pages that people have built. YouTube is simply a platform for monetizing content other people have created. And that’s a key difference here. Most of DARPA’s work is aimed at benefiting society without trying to make a profit. Google’s approach is to extract as much value out of society as possible. That’s how businesses operate.
Google’s got the money to do a lot of fundamental, DARPA type work. But, why bother when they can profit from the work of government-funded projects? And why drive down their stock price?
Good points. How do you see the Google driverless car project fitting in? Any speculations on how they will monetize that?
Ah…yes.
I think the point that is important here is not the level of comparative risk Google might be assuming by picking up DARPA funded companies but instead the full range of “blue sky” technologies Google is aggressively acquiring. If DARPA is the “big risk” governmental agency, then Google clearly is doing a lot of blue sky thinking in the private sector. And once they acquire these radically innovative companies the innovative thinking and risk internal to those organizations will not magically end.
Google has also taken on some massive risks of its own in the past. If anyone had said in 1995 that they were going to photograph every single street and building on the planet and put it all online, we would have called them crazy.
So is risk-taking the essence of DARPA? Or is it what the risk is in service of? DARPA is in service of the Pentagon. Google is a question mark for me.
Yes, as a company, it is in the business of making money. But some of these projects have a very long-range payoff, if any. Driverless cars. Humanoid robots. Moon missions. We’re talking years from payoff, if these projects even succeed in the business sense.
That’s not the sort of risk most companies are willing or able to take, which is why government organizations like DARPA are vital for long-range R&D. But Google is acting more like a DARPA than, say, an Apple, in its pursuit of long-range projects for which the payoff is uncertain.
My question is, what is it in service of? We know what DARPA’s ultimate mission is. What is Google’s?