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It genuinely does suck and is *bad* that it feels like there’s almost nowhere to go for people who 1. Want to work on robotics (like drones) and 2. Don’t want to build weapons.

Everybody talking about Boston Dynamics being in the military robot business is certainly not wrong but might be surprised by the degree to which that is the only robot business there is in this country

which wasn’t always the case! At least not in drones, that’s for sure

It has, like, ALMOST not been the case in robots a few times, but Amazon eating the whole warehouse business, farm robots being badly positioned, the existence of China, etc. it’s hard! I had to push reeeeeaaaally hard to keep our computer vision business on the “mostly not evil” side of the ledger

robotics and autonomous systems aren’t bad in and of themselves, but as long as we exist in an authoritarian capitalist system where these things are used mainly to oppress and surveil the population, people will continue to throw rocks at drones and bully those delivery robots

Sure, and I don’t care if people are mean to the robots even if the robots are doing something socially productive (I know multiple people who’ve been shot at while legally flying drones for socially beneficial research and disaster work, so I mean, I also don’t think it’s ideal)

There was a period between 2013 to about 2024 or so where it seemed to me like it was going to be possible to have a very viable career in purely civilian and socially-beneficial drone mapping and data analysis work. Not so much now. Perhaps we can get back there, I don’t know.