So apparently while I was busy wrapping up holiday shopping (badly, as usual), Google went and bought a robotics company that builds machines specifically designed to survive being kicked really hard. Boston Dynamics, the outfit behind BigDog and that horse-sized headless robot that trots through snow and mud looking like something out of a nightmare, is now a Google property. The news broke over the weekend via the New York Times, and it's the kind of story that makes you sit back from the keyboard for a second.
This isnt Google's first robot purchase this year either. Not even close. Boston Dynamics is reportedly the eighth robotics company Google has scooped up since the summer - Schaft, Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka, Holomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss, and now this one. Running the whole operation is Andy Rubin, the guy who built Android from scratch and then stepped down from running it back in March to go run this instead. That alone tells you Larry Page isnt messing around here. You dont hand an entire secret robot division to the guy who made your mobile OS the biggest in the world unless you actually mean it.
Heres the part that gets me though. Boston Dynamics didnt build cute Roomba-adjacent stuff. Their client list, as far as anyone can tell, has basically been the Pentagon and DARPA for years. BigDog was funded to carry gear for soldiers over terrain wheels cant handle. PETMAN exists to test chemical protection suits by literally walking around and sweating like a person. And Atlas, their newest humanoid, is built tall and heavy and unsettling and is about to headline the DARPA Robotics Challenge trials this weekend down in Florida, starting tomorrow if I have the schedule right. A bunch of the competing teams are actually using Atlas units as their base platform, so in a weird twist Google now technically has a robot in a DARPA disaster-response contest it had nothing to do with organizing.
I dont know how to feel about an advertising company owning that supply chain. Google says, through Rubin, that the existing military contracts will be honored but that this isnt really about defense work going forward. Fine. I believe that the way I believe most corporate statements, which is to say cautiously and with my eyebrows slightly raised. Maybe in five years this is warehouse logistics and search-and-rescue robots and it all seems obviously benign in hindsight. Or maybe Im just watching the opening scene of a documentary somebody makes in 2030. Either way its a genuinely strange thing to read about on a Thursday morning with coffee.
What I keep coming back to is how quietly this happened relative to how big it actually is. Everyone's still consumed with the Target card breach story right now (more on that some other time, my own card is probably sitting on a list somewhere thanks to a Black Friday run I regret), and meanwhile Google assembled what amounts to a full robotics conglomerate over six months without most people noticing until a single Times article dropped this week. No press conference, no keynote, no cute product video. Just eight acquisitions and a guy who used to run Android quietly building something nobody outside the company has actually seen run yet.
If you havent watched the BigDog videos, go find them, they're on YouTube and theyre genuinely unsettling in a way thats hard to explain until you see the thing recover its balance after getting kicked sideways on ice by some guy in a lab coat. Its not scary because its fast or armed, its scary because it moves like an animal instead of a machine. That gait is the whole reason this stuff sticks in your head longer than a new phone spec sheet ever does. I made the mistake of showing my mom the video over the weekend and she has not stopped bringing it up since.
Consider this your reminder that while were all arguing about which streaming box to put under the tree, actual legged robots partly funded by the Pentagon just changed corporate ownership without anyone getting a vote. Something to think about next time your thermostat updates itself in the middle of the night.