Google may sell its robotic subsidiary Boston Dynamics

New York, March 18: Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. may sell its robotics subsidiary Boston Dynamics as the Alphabet executives think that the robotics company is unlikely to generate substantial revenue and hard to work with. According to a report from Bloomberg on Thursday, internal messages at Google shows that the company itself is a bit scared by Boston Dynamics.

“There is excitement from the tech press, but we are also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” Courtney Hohne, director of communications for Google X wrote in a private email that was obtained by Bloomberg.

“We do not want to trigger a whole separate media cycle about where BD really is at Google,” she later wrote, adding that “we are not going to comment on this video because there’s really not a lot we can add, and we do not want to answer most of the Qs it triggers.”

These humanoid robots can fall and stand up again like in Terminator and can work like living beings. Google acquired Boston Dynamics and a few other robotics startups in December 2013 to build a robotics engineering team and make them work with Boston Dynamics on robotics projects.

Google was supposed to ship affordable robots as quickly as possible but leadership changes and clashes between robotics engineers working for Google and Boston Dynamics engineers eventually led to an inability to deliver, the report said.

Toyota or Amazon could be interested in acquiring Boston Dynamics for their manufacturing or warehouse operations. (IANS)