These are one of the few times I can say that I don't care if Boston Dynamics are making money as yet.
Boston Dynamics are one of the few real serious players in the robotics space worldwide doing deep R&D.
Hyundai are basically paying for the BD Labs research. And they are well positioned to reap the products and techniques from the lab with their own manufacturing and engineering prowess and experience over the next decade.
And it won't be walking dogs.
It will be things like a little flexi-joint in a car that you buy without knowing (or caring) it's in there. Or some industrial machine that Hyundai builds that gives them a 5% competitive edge in the manufacturing of it that 99.9999% of us never hear about.
But for that it's worth it.
Very happy to see people put good money into this Lab.
The key competence of BD is locomotion on legs. There are plenty of other companies that make stationary industrial robots, and a few who make wheeled robots.
But there are still a number of areas where wheeled robots are at a disadvantage: inspection of complex industrial installations (like complex pipework and other hard-to-reach areas), firefighting and rescue operations, well, even delivery in places with steps and stairways.
Korea is more technophilic than USA, and Hyundai is well-connected. They may find a more ready market for such products.
There are plenty of patents along the way to get to locomotion on legs that have uses that don't necessarily need to be applied in that manner. Hyundai gets all of those too.
I imagine Hyundai Motors has loose informal connections and regular collaborative efforts with other former Hyundai Group companies, including Hyundai Heavy Industries and Hyundai Robotics, so hopefully there'll be some smooth expertise sharing there.
Robots that build cars seem most likely? Not sure how many staff your average car factory has, but due to sheer product complexity it's still more than other industries like food manufacturing.
Maybe we'll see vast car factories, churning out thousands of cars per day, with only a half dozen staff in years to come?
Google image search "car factory" and it's super obviously it's quite labour intensive. I'm not sure why an investment in robots has to be "new ground".
The Google Image search isn't reflective of an actual car factory.. There are of course hundreds of workers there but final assembly facilities produce something like 1 car/minute. They're heavily reliant on robots - most of the parts move around the floor on autonomous transports, the stamping is all robotic, all of the frame welding is robotic, paint is of course robotic.
GM is of course tied in with the UAW, so they're going to be as favorable to labor as possible in their promo videos, but take a look at this video of one of their production facilities, this is reflective of the amount of manual input into modern automotive production:
I've toured this plant. They don't show it in this video, but in the stamping and body areas of the plant, they don't even have the lights on at task levels - it's a dusk-level lighting until a human enters the space. This plant was built circa 2006, and is pretty amazing. Bring steel coils into one side of the factory, get a fully assembled car from the other side.
You're using the wrong terms. Add "advanced manufacturing" to the query to get some idea of the current state of things. I toured a new automotive plant over 10 years ago and up until the final configuration stage, the only manual labor was cabling and quality control. This included sheet metal unloading and delivery (from rail), stamping of the chassis, welding, paint, installation of doors, hood, suspension, etc, powertrain installation, and many others. From my estimate, 2/3 of the factory was very close to being "lights out." The entire welding and paint process was fully automated and required a line stop to enter the area.
You are right, modern car manufacturers still use humans in assembly lines.
But to see how much robots actually do nowadays, compare that to auto assembly from decades ago when robots were new, or further back when they did not exist
Yup! And really, the highly, highly automated processes in car manufacturing are in the stamping, body construction and painting phases. Almost no humans involved in those three major phases. Final Assembly is the most labor intensive, because it involves lots of fiddly little parts going into hard to reach places. Even then, it's usually robot-assisted tasks, so one person is installing a seat, where it would usually take two, or something like that.
Humans do the basic stuff that robots aren't any good at: pulling wires through, putting some pieces in an inconvenient place,etc. All the welding, painting and many others are fully automated.
Humans spend 15h to 60h of labour to build a car. After, humans worked on individual parts, shipping, loading etc.
My rule of thumb is that there is about 10% of manufacture cost that are direct or indirect cost connected to payroll.
If I may add another axis of reflexion that I consider fundamental for modern engineers to consider, food for machines for producing a car (44% natural gas when smithing things) is about 15 to 25% of the energy cost to use the car in its lifetime, according to the EU. Or about 2,400 euro of a 8L/100km car.
So in a world where energy gets more expensive, automation needs to definitely evolve, but not solely to be faster or replace more humans.
Even 60h seems low here. Do you only mean assembly? Tacking on parts manufacturing, sub-component assembly, and software is likely to increase that estimate by a factor of 2 to 5.
Maybe. Another possible variant on that idea could be micro-factories [1] that address delivery constraints and allow a factory to be located anywhere there is a small warehouse.
In a factory setting I would have thought existing robots would suffice.
Looking at the wider group, I would think there's lots of roles for robotics in construction. Delivery of heavy items across uneven terrain or up stairs - may be something like a robotic hod carrier.
They are pretty great at welding and painting, they not as good at attaching bumpers or trunk lids, and terrible at running wire looms through doors or installing headliners.
Also from my last visit at an assembly plant ~5 years ago, most plants are still on large conveyors vs. driving individual vehicles around the plant, and materials handling is still in the 90's with little stripe-following tugs slowly moving about the place.
I think people are missing the point of this comment. The US invested heavily in BD, and now BD is being incorporated into a South Korean company rather than a US company.
I presume this is mostly because US manufacturing industry is relatively dead so capex for potential automation gains don't make sense for US firms.
The perception that US manufacturing is dead is mostly just perception, if you look at the actual numbers.
Before the big dip caused by covid, the value of US manufacturing output had never been higher. [1]
Even in inflation adjusted/real value terms, US manufacturing output is 50% higher today than it was 30 years ago.
My guess is that the perception is cause by a few factors:
- fewer people are employed in manufacturing than were in the past because of improved manufacturing technology/productivity
- other sectors of the US economy have grown at a faster rate than manufacturing (tech for example) which means manufacturing represents a smaller share of a bigger pie
- the US is no longer number 1 in the world as China surpassed the US about 10 years ago. But the US still manufactures more than Germany, Japan and South Korea combined, for example.
The legal landscape in the U.S. may be harder to navigate, labor laws more strict, and salaries necessarily higher. This all makes it hard for U.S. manufacturing to compete on production of commodities.
Like many of the EU industries, viable U.S. industries tends to produce and export unique things with relatively small physical volume: complex chips, complex chemical compounds (like medicines), precision mechanics, high-performance agricultural equipment, aircraft, spacecraft, etc. Of course the U.S. does produce higher-volume things, too, from cars to foods to fuels, but these are more for domestic consumption, and often face competition from imported goods even domestically.
Not to mention land prices mean salaries need to be higher for the workers to afford rent/mortgages, facilities more expensive, higher property taxes, even ancillary purchases are more expensive.
What if we opened up immigration and built factories in middle America?
Provide path to citizenship and education opportunities for children of immigrants, but host all manufacturing domestically at rates comparable to overseas facilities. Beat them on opportunity and subsidize workplace safety and vacation.
Provide tax incentives or transferable/sellable credits. We could even federally purchase the land and provide no-cost ground lease.
Dollars to dollars, this would make way more sense than extending Amtrak. It'd also stop population decline and create a next generation of American consumer.
I believe DARPA is a national treasure, and has driven a ton of otherwise neglected innovation, but let's not overstate their contribution to Moderna. For exsmple, AstraZeneca did a deal with Moderna including a $240MM upfront to another $180MM for potential milestones six months before the DARPA money. That is all on top of a pile of venture money and other corporate deals over those few years. The value of the DARPA $25MM wasn't the money per se, it was the incentive for Moderna to keep a toe in infectious disease, which was a hobby for them (and the industry) at best before COVID. I believe the platform would have been established with or without the DARPA money.
>For exsmple, AstraZeneca did a deal with Moderna including a $240MM upfront to another $180MM for potential milestones six months before the DARPA money.
This is called "biobucks" in the industry. There's an incentive to close big deals for management and business types in biotech, so they love to craft these large headlines to drop it on their resume and grift at another big pharma.
I'd be surprised if they ever received the $180MM, although $240MM upfront is really impressive.
I think "grift" is a bit cynical. I agree the 'biobucks' concept largely exits, but it also good deal-making. A huge upfront is 100% risk on the buyer. Paying out incrementally for accomplishments is common and good business sense risk-sharing and should happen in almost any industry.
The larger point is that Moderna was flush with cash for years before COVID, and the DARPA money wasn't that 'crazy' of an investment, or essential to Moderna's progress.
Not everything DARPA does is going to be a hit. Don't forget they're responsible for virtually all of the funding that helped build the myriad technologies that comprise the Internet.
I don't know where to even look for this, but it would be interesting to see if the DARPA investment bought them a perpetual, irrevocable license to technologies they funded.
Normally tech companies tend to be overpriced, but $880M for 80% of Boston Dynamics (total value of $1.1 billion), doesn't that seem a little low?
Other tech companies can seemingly lose millions, as long as there's an advertising or data-mining angle to the product. Because Boston Dynamics aim to actually create physical products they then get valued lower?
It's the same issue faced by other "moonshot" R&D enterprises like DeepMind. They burn tremendous amounts of cash, and as other comments have noted, the path to profit is unlikely to be a direct path through their core competency, whether that be general purpose robotics or AGI.
DeepMind's greatest commercial achievement seems to have been around optimizing energy usage in Google's datacenters, which as a standalone product would have a relatively small addressable market. The progress that BD has made is likely similar: immediately valuable to a small number of players, even if the long term winds up being something far more grand.
The research they've done is undeniably awesome, but valuations aren't based on awesomeness, they're based on ability to make money. So far, Boston Dynamics hasn't done much there. There's potential to make a lot of money, but that's far off.
Your typical tech unicorn can at least tell a story of tens or hundreds of millions of potential customers (either paying or eyeball-monetized) with a unit cost of pennies per customers.
Boston Dynamics story is still "each robot costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars" and "almost no one has a use for one".
Honestly I'm not sure there's a story for a profitable market for humanoid robots until your robots are sophisticated enough to build themselves.
They've gone from Google -> Softbank -> Hyundai in a few years.
Does anyone know where their revenue is coming from currently? For all the flashy videos they put out, you so rarely see them that I'm not sure if they're just doing well on the B2B side (warehouse automation? military contracts?), or if they've been in the red for the last decade.
I asked something like this last time as well. I don't think they have any meaningful revenue except for their dog bot "spot" which they only launched very recently. They basically just survive on funding, kind of like some university research group
i'm not sure if they operate in the classical sense of a company with a budget. i see them more as a research facility with huge interest from the military and law enforcement complex.
> They've gone from Google -> Softbank -> Hyundai in a few years.
I was a contractor at Google when the Google//Boston Dynamics was happening, I now work//live in Silicon Valley, I grew up in MA, so I've been mildly following the story.
Softbank said they were purposefully selling things off to do stock buybacks and cut debt earlier this year. They supposedly paid $100M for BD, so selling it for $880M would be a nice way to do that. I think the ping-pong is just coincidental timing of both Google and Softbank wanting to sell off R&D type things.
They bleed money and are not revenue positive yet. And all those re-acquisitions indicate that none of their parent company could provide a nurturing environment to enable the company to make profit.
My two cents. If not military use or a very expensive niche use, e.g. for emergency services, then those things will have a pretty hard time to enter the mass-consumer market.
What will probably happen is that a Chinese company will be able to produce a 80% version of those machines for less than 1k. This is when those things will become interesting to consumers for whatever purpose those things can be used.
As long as the SPOT robot costs over 70k, nobody will even consider buying it.
Unitree's Go1 is currently $2.7K. I commented on the HN thread below that if walking robots have any use/future - A company like Unitree could become the DJI of the industry and make Boston Dynamics even more of a niche player than it already is.
As someone who has worked with both Unitree and Boston Dynamics I can tell you there is a marked difference in the ability for Boston dynamic's ability to walk vs Unitree's. The ANYMal is closer to Boston Dynamic's capabilities but also at a similar price point. That being said what Unitree is lacking is good software so theres a chance that they may be able to incrementally catch up while maintaining a relatively low pricepoint. I don't think we're gonna see a DJI moment any time soon in this space purely because the other algorithms around this area are still in their infancy. Furthermore, motor prices don't seem to have fallen all that much making innovation in this space much harder than with drones.
Forgive me if I'm wrong but I though motors aren't the main cost, rather the rest of the actuator?
Also Unitree is going to make so much money selling these as well as get so much mass producing experience they'll probably be able to figure out the algorithms. Methinks the code is easier to figure out than reliable and cheap hardware.
You can see this in the Unitree videos, nearly everything is on a flat plane and while it was a video from 2019 it seemed to struggle climbing stairs a bit.
The high cost components of a robot like this are: Actuators, motor drivers, batteries, compute, sensors, and mechanical components.
I did not reference SPOTs specs but it must be full of low volume custom parts (expensive). They are honestly probably selling them at little to no profit as $70k is about how much a low volume custom research robot might cost in parts. But I could see them getting SPOT down to $20k in parts, but then you still need to do assembly which is going to be very hands on with technicians doing assembly and test engineers checking components. And one could imagine they'd like it if they could manage some profit. IDK it all adds up robots are super expensive.
The more expensive versions of the Go1 have Lidar.
Robot dogs are going to look like dogs - a body with legs. According to the about page, the CEO has been developing quadruped robots since 2013 (his masters thesis).
https://www.unitree.com/aboutus
Softbank has served as the intermediary of a few major tech asset transfers the past decade - Sprint->TMobile, ARM->Nvidia,BD->Hyundai. Pretty impressive stuff given the geopolitical/regulatory implications. Who knew Softbank had such clout? The more you read about Softbank, the "curiouser" it gets.
This and the first few replies to it feel like they're coming from bean counters, not engineers. Who reads HN? I mean anyone can, but who's the core audience. I'm confused. Shouldn't the top voted thread be about the tech and the engineering behind it, and debating whether it's worth funding or not based on that, not based on things that are mostly the concern of business people. Is it that most engineers today have MBAs or are MBA wannabes? or well roundedness? But this focus on business metrics is not well roundedness, for an engineer, IMO.
I'm more just shocked that they're valued at 1B and are still doing their thing without a clear path to a sellable product. It's great and something I'd like to see more of, but we're long past the days when companies would spend a lot of money on long-term research projects.
To be fair, nobody was under any illusion that this valuation had anything to do with the technology WhatsApp developed. Any half competent team could recreate WhatsApp. The price was for 1 billion active users. That's a little harder to get.
Being able to do sentiment analysis on all the consumers of the world is a goldmine for revenue. Marketing doesn't have a good reputation, but information is power.
I think the next step of mobility is a mobile robot. The cars of the future should be a central hub for move people between places, but able to do a lot more through physical manipulation, instead of becoming a enlarged mobile information terminal.
Thus, developing cars as robots are going to be more useful in that future.
I personally will invest time in building products that are mobility robots, not cars with giant screen.
I just want my car to drive itself to service checks, when I'm at work. Save all that trouble of having to gamble that they have a car you can use, or there's a bus route that won't take you an hour back and forth.
Self-driving done right could save me from having two cars. It could take me to work, drive back home, pickup the wife, drive her to work. Go back and pick me up in the afternoon, drop me of at home and the drive back to get the wife.
This made me think of something I hadn't considered before - whether we'll first see automated driving, but only when the vehicle is empty. e.g., you drive yourself somewhere, then the vehicle moves on to another job. If the vehicle is privately owned, it would park or drive home for your wife to use. If part of a fleet, it would just drive on to the next request.
Cars in that mode could be constrained to a less dangerous speed to limit damage in an accident. I don't want to drive to work at 20km/h, but once I'm out of the car, I don't really care how slowly it goes.
Of course, it wouldn't necessarily work to combine too broadly differing speeds on the same roads. But it would remove a bit of the "I'm not putting on my VR goggles to do work and trusting this car to drive to the office" fear.
A basic form of low-speed self-driving would be automated valet parking. Drop people off or pick them up at the entrance, then go park far away.
If there was a common communication standard, the vehicles could also park much more tightly than is done in a normal parking lot. You don't need to keep empty space behind each car when you can coordinate the parked cars to move and clear a path. My guess is that you could park almost twice as many cars in the same space.
The combination of reducing parking lot size and freeing people from walking to/from the lot would open up many interesting options for increasing density and walkability in commercial areas.
There are other options. They could take surface roads instead of highways. Or they could potentially use the emergency lane if there's some kind of communication standard to let them know when to get out of the emergency lane.
this would be the best usage for what we consider cars imaginable. also would negate the need to personally own a car. just order one from a fleet of autonomous cars if you are in need of mobility.
Ideally yes, but there's a lot of hurdles to overcome. For many it would work just fine, but for other there's going to be minor details that makes it work less well.
Firstly we need to spread out peoples work day. We can't all be at the office a 8:00, and go home at 16:00. it wouldn't make economical sense in have a fleet large enough to handle peak hours, but have the cars do nothing most of the day.
There's also details like: I would like a car to pick me up at 15:45, and drive me to the kindergarten, and that car MUST have a seat for a three year old (but not a seat of brand X, Y, or Z, because they're to small). Or I need a car with a trailer, or a truck, because I'm moving 500kg of dirt to the recycling station.
Most people shop around for cars and pick very specific cars that fit their needs. So renting for a fleet of cars also need a rather large variety and flexibility in allowed usage.
I believe that many would still want to buy their own cars, even if it's self-driving, to ensure it's available when they need it, and that it fulfil their specific needs.
If we didn't have all these specific needs, most of us could just take the bus, which in turn would make it feasible to have all the bus routes people would need.
> it wouldn't make economical sense in have a fleet large enough to handle peak hours, but have the cars do nothing most of the day.
But that’s the current state of the world.
Even if you have enough cars to meet peak demand you will have an efficiency saving (at least where I live you see a lot of cars in driveways during rush hour traffic).
That said I agree that for a lot of people their car is an extension of their home, they’ll keep the golf clubs and a coat in the boot etc. But for the 80% case of just carrying a rucksack to and from work there is a massive efficiency improvement to be had.
True, but the difference is who's carrying the financial risk of the buying the car. Right now it's the individual consumers, who are mostly forced to do so, because better alternatives are not available.
Leasing companies would never buy a fleet of cars that would sit mostly unused. Their cars needs to be on the road most of the time.
This puts us back in Uber vs. taxis. Uber works because (depending on area and regulation) there cannot be sufficient taxis to handle peak demands, that wouldn't be financially sound for the taxi companies. Uber tries to fix this, by taping into idle cars in the driveways. A company that maintains a fleet of cars that you can just order on-demand, would always have to few cars for rush hour.
> True, but the difference is who's carrying the financial risk of the buying the car. Right now it's the individual consumers, who are mostly forced to do so, because better alternatives are not available.
car-sharing already exists on a large scale in German capitals. you can park and pickup cars from e.g. Sixt or Share Now everywhere within a marked area. the business model for owning and maintaining a big fleet is already there.
The fleet would be sized to whatever was profitable. If people were willing to pay more at rush hour, there would be some capacity to capture that demand.
Thinking through what it costs me to own a car, I'm going to carefully do the math if they price my trip into the office at more than about $5 (it's a short drive). That's probably the bigger problem.
>just order one from a fleet of autonomous cars if you are in need of mobility.
I find it confusing that one reason the tech crowd cheered on Uber's success was because taxis were often filthy and poorly maintained. But autonomous car fleets won't be?
For years they made the news with bots that seemed to have direct defense/militaristic use.
Not too long ago, or at least the last time I remember them hitting my news streams, was when they demonstrated a bot capable of handling moderately complex warehouse tasks.
If my reading of this sequence of events is correct, it is probably no coincidence that foreign investment came in after applications shifted from tactical militaristic use that would likely be restricted to the US & allies, and now also includes applications more generally applicable to uses outside of warfare.
It seems that military applications may be compelling, but plowshares are more economically interesting.
That's not what happened. The military flat out rejected their robots for being too big, too loud, and too slow. So they pivoted to try to find a new customer.
I'd be a little sad if this technology only ended up being useful as a toy, but then again the biggest disruptors are at one point thought of as toys, so maybe that's about where we are in the process?
If they monetized their YouTube channel I’m guessing it would be their biggest revenue source, as far as I’m concerned they are an entertainment company already.
BD was once under Google/Alphabet's control - then they let them go, what does that mean?
Was their robotics efforts not useful to Google's own research branch?
Did acquihired the talent and then resold what was left to SoftBank?
I have no clue...then SoftBank sold it again..
What I know is surely BD must have gone through a lot of turmoil (acquisitions) for such a small company (300ish employees?) since its inception!
I think it's quite the loss for the US to allow a foreign company to gain controlling interest in such a cutting edge firm. Some of what they've built I'd have to imagine could be of very real national interest as it relates to any of the military applications.
A controlling stake means you own enough shares to have full voting control (i.e., you control the board votes, can appoint the executives and set the company direction) without having to pay for 100% of the shares.
There are a few reasons to only acquire a controlling stake rather than 100% of the shares; you might want to preserve capital for other uses, or leave some shares to be traded on public markets so the stock still has a market valuation.
A controlling stake doesn't have to own the majority of the company, just the majority of voting shares. It gives you meaningful influence over the board and executives but does not entitle you to all (or even a majority of) of any profit.
Boston Dynamics is the one company on this planet that inspires me and makes me believe in a wonderful future that we have yet to even glimpse. I hope they keep doing what they're doing and elevate our species to new heights. God bless them.
Honestly, of all the mega-corps that could have been the ones for this round of BD bailout, this isn't a bad choice at all. Hyundai already has a strong background in robotics, and hopefully they'll be able to help Boston Dynamics to finally capitalize on their excellent work.
I do wish controlling interest had managed to stay stateside, but, well, it is what it is.
Hyundai's interests are broad enough that I really wonder what they intend to do with it. Are they just going to do factory helper robots that are super-specialized and we'll never see? Or will they actually commercially sell some version of these types of robots?
i thought that boston dynamics were a former DOD contractor, did this cause any problems with the authorization of the sale? (here it says that they got a lot of initial DARPA funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics )
We just sold South Korea a bunch of actual weapons so I don’t think these could-be weapons are going to attract too much controversy. And if you think there’s some actual weaponry among the could-be weapons technology, well... Take a look around the neighborhood. Maybe that’s the point?
(I don’t think this is true; I am of the belief that the hidden secret within most companies, regardless of size or industry, is that they’re way more boring and way less sophisticated than they would like to appear.)
> Take a look around the neighborhood. Maybe that’s the point?
Probably not, since South Korea maintains pretty good relations with its neighbors. South Korea (as well as the rest of the world) doesn't see the U.S. anymore as a rational partner, but as something to be managed with caution. North Korea is unironically seen as a more predictable and reliable enemy than the U.S. is seen as a reliable ally. Nobody is happy about this, but that's the reality.
Are you actually from South Korea to be able to comment on what the South Korean perception on their neighborhood is? Like, this is a no offense intended genuine question.
Because from an outside perspective the neighborhood really looks challenging. China is growing stronger and throws muscle around a lot with diplomatic rows ensuing even over traditional ways of cabbage preparation. Relationships with Japan are cordial at best due to WWII legacy. North Korea seems to be a pretty big liability.
As a South Korean, I can share some perspective. There has always been pro-American and anti-American atmosphere in South Korea. Recently, the scale seems to be more and more skewed towards the United States. We're definitely not in favor of North Korea, and even regarding China, more and more South Korean are seeing them as a threat rather than a partner. We don't love the US either, but when faced to choose between the US and China, most Korean would choose the US. I guess the GP was just salty about the Trump administration.
The South Korean position locally is actually not that challenging in a particular sense, despite typical media exaggerations. It's almost straightforward. SK has strong economic and cultural ties to its neighbors that can be accessed to stabilize relations if needed. North Korea is not really a liability in itself. KJU has been acting consistently towards opening up the North Korean economy on NK's own terms, which would benefit both nations tremendously. Those kinds of attempts are being stonewalled by Biden, and that's causing the U.S. to lose favor even among some pro-Americanists. As for the kimchi problem, I don't know what to say. That's the same kind of bickering as when France tells people to stop labeling things as champagne. I understand that those things can get brutal, but it's nothing world-changing. Beneath the headlines, South Korea has been quietly strengthening relations with China, because South Korea is not suicidal. The groundwork has to be laid today for the eventuality of a Chinese economy that is at least twice the strength of the U.S. economy. But even without China, at some point people are going to have to learn to live in a way that isn't dictated by the fears of the American empire.
South Korea has been a stalwart US ally for many years. While you're right that relations with NK and China have softened, and calling them challenging is probably an overestimation, the US is far from a bit player in the region.
Like any democracy, you have continents of folks that want to cozy up to China, and others that trust the history of their relationships with the US and Japan.
South Korea has been less of an ally than it has been a client state of the U.S. "Ally" implies some degree of autonomy for both parties. South Korea has never really had the opportunity to act for itself, and when it has, it has received cold and rather tonedeaf responses from the U.S. (just look at the recent visit by Moon to the U.S.). That's not at all to say that the SK-US relation is inauthentic; there's definitely something genuine there. But that authenticity doesn't to seem recognized by the current administration. Biden seems to want to keep South Korea as the client state that it has always been despite (what seems to me) to be reasonable demands of sovereignty.
Power imbalances are nothing new, and I don't see what about South Korea would make it a "client state". The presence of military bases? South Korea is absolutely an autonomous country with its own military. I don't understand your comment at all.
I don't believe the least bit that there are more than a few people in South Korea who believe that they are living 'in a way dictated by fears of the American empire'.
I say this as someone living in a region where the 'local neighborhood' also has its challenges in the form of a wannabe world power local authoritarian hegemon. Alliances, including the one with the US, are seen as paramount for security and long-term sovereignty. If that also fulfills some US strategic interests, so be it. The alternative is dreadful.
I think you're misunderstanding. Learning not to live according to the fears of the American Empire doesn't mean learning to be opposed to the American people or to break alliances. If anything, it should our job to lecture Americans on what is and is not appropriate fears to have.
The headline definitely downplays Hyundai’s involvement:
> The deal will involve Hyundai and its affiliates, including Hyundai Motor Co., Hyundai Mobis Co., and Hyundai Glovis Co.
> Hyundai Motor, Hyundai Mobis, Hyundai Glovis, and Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Euisun will have 30%, 20%, 10%, and 20% share respectively.
It’s been a while since I’ve had to think about consolidated financial reporting for subsidiaries and — if anyone happens to know — I’d be curious to understand how (or whether) these ownership tranches will make it onto Hyundai Parent Co’s financial statements?
Boston Dynamics are one of the few real serious players in the robotics space worldwide doing deep R&D.
Hyundai are basically paying for the BD Labs research. And they are well positioned to reap the products and techniques from the lab with their own manufacturing and engineering prowess and experience over the next decade.
And it won't be walking dogs.
It will be things like a little flexi-joint in a car that you buy without knowing (or caring) it's in there. Or some industrial machine that Hyundai builds that gives them a 5% competitive edge in the manufacturing of it that 99.9999% of us never hear about.
But for that it's worth it.
Very happy to see people put good money into this Lab.