Google's AI Vision May No Longer Include Giant Robots

Good news for the deeply paranoid among us: If the apocalypse arrives via giant anthropomorphic robots, they probably won't be bankrolled by Google. On Thursday, Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced that it was selling Boston Dynamics, its premier robotics division, to the Japanese telco giant SoftBank for an undisclosed sum. The deal also includes a smaller robotics company called Schaft. Boston Dynamics was less a moonshot than a sci-fi horror brought to life. Even before being acquired by Google in 2013, the 25-year-old company had already developed a Beast Wars–style squadron of robot predators with names like BigDog and WildCat, as well as a humanoid model called Atlas.