#techbrofascism — Public Fediverse posts

From 2017: #Google has finally found a buyer for its amazing, scary robot companies, #BostonDynamics and #Schaft: #SoftBank

The companies are not disclosing a price.

by April Glaser
Updated Jun 8, 2017, 10:07 PM EDT

"Japan’s big-betting holding firm SoftBank is buying Boston Dynamics, one of the most highly regarded robotics labs in the world, from Google’s parent company #Alphabet for an undisclosed price.

"Google acquired Boston Dynamics in 2013 under the leadership of Andy Rubin, the co-inventor of #Android, who was leading a wave of acquisitions of robotics companies under the search giant.

"Boston Dynamics’ robots routinely make headlines, including a high-profile demo at this year’s TED conference. The company, led by CEO Marc Raibert, has made a robotic cheetah that can run 28 miles per hour, a robotic dog that it recently used to deliver packages to doorsteps in Boston, and most recently a massive legged and wheeled robot that can clear hurdles and walk down stairs.

"The firm has been hailed by other roboticists for its ability to blend hardware and #ArtificialIntelligence to make machines capable of dynamic, agile movements. Its most recent wheeled robot, Handle, can manipulate objects that are comparable to its own weight, and its four-legged, animal-like robots can maneuver over different types of terrain.

"One industry source said earlier this year that Boston Dynamics’ most recent machine 'changes the whole ballgame.'

"SoftBank is also buying Schaft, a Japan-based robotics firm that unveiled a bipedal walking robot last year, from Alphabet. A source close to the matter said Schaft, which was part of Google, never fully integrated into the company and operated as a sort of separate entity taking a different approach to robotics than the rest of Google.

"The deal makes sense for SoftBank, which has been working in robotics for years, having acquired a majority stake in the robotics company #Aldebaran in 2012. Aldebaran makes the humanoid robot Pepper, which is being used in retail and customer service settings throughout Japan, and increasingly in the U.S. SoftBank has also invested in related technologies, including buying chip design firm #ARMHoldings last year for more than $30 billion. SoftBank also led a $20 million investment round in #FetchRobotics, a company that makes warehouse logistics robots, in 2015.

"Rubin left Google in 2014 after driving a string of robotics acquisitions, which, sources have told Recode, left a number of the companies without much direction about what their role at Google would be.

"Prior to being acquired by Google, Boston Dynamics largely operated on military research contracts. Its humanoid #Atlas robot was used in #DARPA’s robotics challenge in 2015."

https://www.vox.com/2017/6/8/15766440/softbank-alphabet-google-robotics-boston-dynamics-schaft
#Terminator #TechBroFascism

Really good research from 'HOPE not hate' on the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), a kind of successor to the Pioneer Fund, continuing its work of supporting and funding "scientific" racist research.

As is so often the case, a mega-rich asshole from Silicon Valley has coughed up a lot of the funding. In this case, that asshole is Andrew Conru, founder of Adult FriendFinder (sorry, swingers), who has given HDF no less than $1.3 million.

Among the other major players are Emil Kirkegaard (legal name: William Engman), who is easily one of, if not the, best known race "scientist" in the world.

Another is Erik Ahrens, a close associate of "identitarian" figurehead Martin Sellner's and a member of Alternative for Germany (AfD). He specifically wants to turn "Germany, or probably eastern Germany, a state power," into a white ethnostate and is seeking to build an "international network generating revenue in different countries" in order to do that.

Anyways, good work all around, and well worth reading.

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From the article:

In an online presentation to our undercover reporter in October 2023, Matthew Frost claimed that HDF has two arms. Emil Kirkegaard runs the “underground research arm”, a continuation of Pioneer’s main activity. It is a group of academics and independent researchers that convene weekly for a video call to coordinate ideas and share access to genetic data sets.

The team aims to slip papers into academic journals with higher impact and circulation than their own publications. If unable to do so, HDF will publish the group’s papers in their print journal Mankind Quarterly or the OpenPsych website, which has been described as “a pseudoscience factory-farm”. Kirkegaard is associated with the management of both titles. During a research team meeting in November 2023, Kirkegaard told his researchers that an article on “international dysgenics” was unlikely to get accepted by a proper academic imprint unless their colleague Bryan Pesta, a former scholar at Cleveland State University, could “make the words soft and sweet”. HDF leaders discussed a “pipeline” whereby the underground research team would publish scientific racism articles that would then be promoted by HDF’s public operations like Aporia or Edward Dutton’s YouTube channel, “The Jolly Heretic”.

A diagram shown to our undercover reporter shows that the research team has approximately 10 members. The meeting our infiltrator attended had 11 writers from the UK, the US, and Europe, including Kirkegaard. At least one contributor (Meng Hu at the University of Hong Kong) was not present. Several of the team are known in the world of scientific racism, and had contributed to Aporia or had in the past been funded by Pioneer. Chief among them is Bryan Pesta, who between 2019 and 2022 received Pioneer money and was dismissed from his academic position at Cleveland State University in February 2022 for misusing genetic data in his research.

Davide Piffer is also part of the team. His 2013 paper on intelligence and race was cited by Payton Gendron, the terrorist who shot dead 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022. The gunman wrote in his manifesto that Black people have a “lesser IQ”, concluding: “We must remove blacks from our western civilizations.” In past research papers, Piffer was credited as a member of the psychology department at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, however a representative said he never completed his PhD and left after a year in undisclosed circumstances.

Members of the research team are sometimes successful in smuggling their articles into peer reviewed journals. Piffer co-wrote an article with Kirkegaard focused on IQ for the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics, published by Cambridge University Press, in March 2024.

https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/race-science-inc/

#HumanDiversityFoundation #HDF #PioneerFund #EmilKirkegaard #ErikAhrens #PeterThiel #AmRen #noAfD #fcknzs #fascism #ScientificRacism #racism #eugenics #HopeNotHate #TheJollyHeretic #EdwardDutton #MartinSellner #TechBro #TechBroFascism