I found some of the almost mournful passages in this piece off-putting. As the author ultimately recognizes, the drift of robotics talent from publicly funded universities to private enterprises is an indication that the technology has advanced to the point of commercial viability.

In other words: Companies finally think they can build robots that are good enough that people will pay for them! To me, that is exciting news, not an occasion to lament the sudden emptiness of university laboratories.

Perhaps in other fields, there is a strong tension between the basic research that government funds and the commercial applications that private companies pursue. But in robotics there are usually foreseeable uses for the technologies that researchers are pursuing. I don't foresee the direction of the field being dramatically changed, particularly given the amount of government money that will still pour in through the DoD.

Uber didn't buy CMU's robotics department. They hired the employees. CMU didn't get any money out of it.

It's good to see robotics finally happening. I used to be in that field; I had one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams in 2005, and was a visiting scholar in robotics at Stanford in the early 1990s, where I figured out how to get legged robots run over rough terrain. It was all too early back then. Now I'm too old.

Nobody is making any money yet, though. Other than teleoperators for the military, vacuum cleaners, and industrial robots, there are no robot products that sell in quantity. Industrial robots with some limited AI are now available[1] but sales are small. This still isn't a commercial technology.

[1] http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/

"There’s a useful high-tech concept called the Technology Readiness Level that helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came up with this scale to gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. At Level 1, an area of scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands its basic principles. At Level 9, the related technology is so mature it’s ready to be used in commercial products."

There's a often a big difference between the people who like to work on level 1 verse level 9 stuff. "How do I scale this to be used by 10,000 people?" isn't even an interesting/relevant question to a researcher pursuing level 1 areas of science, but it's one of the most important questions for an engineer of a technology at level 9.

It seems to me that Silicon Valley's unicorns are themselves turning into incubators for future spin offs. Uber is taking a ridiculous amount of funding and investing in what can barely be called related technologies. It's not a conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC. It's ... Something new. And it's not alone.

Google, Amazon, AirBnB for heavens sake, all are placing bets on future innovations and models a long way from their core. I don't have a problem with this, but it's going to have a lot of knock on impacts. From traditional business valuation techniques to how to tax R&D globally, we are going to see a few decades where unfair and undemocratic could be the global theme, or, we could see better forms of governance emerge.

This, Uber going robotics crazy, is for me just a trigger to realise what has been going on for a while, from Pikkety to Varoufakis, tech has emerged from nice career to political engine of the next decades.

The boy has started saying the emperor has no clothes on. We the people need to know how to deal with a naked emperor and a new species of global something's. We the developers are not isolated from the political effects of the fun technologies we work with.

Gosh I'm pontificating now ...

As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run.

The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of partnering with companies like Uber in the future.

Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research. The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open source model was based on.

Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented, it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research.

So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose results are less monetizable.

The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY! Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the profits will go to the private sector.

I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot further.

Replace patents with prizes.

What's the connection between Uber and Robotics? Computer vision for driving?

This happened to the University of Toronto's Machine Learning lab. Microsoft just came in and handed out salary offers to everyone. Makes complete sense compared to buying out an actual company.

Hopefully this will drive more funding to privately funded research by non-academic groups. I've struggled with such issue in the past.

Excellent. I shall dig it out from under the stairs then and give it a bit of a dust.